Head of dementia care at Four Seasons Health Care wins lifetime achievement award

Caroline Baker, head of Quality and Dementia Care at Four Seasons Health Care has won the Lifetime Achievement award at this year’s National Dementia Awards.

Caroline Baker, Caroline Baker, head of Quality and Dementia Care at Four Seasons Health Care

Ms Baker has been recognised for her contribution to helping develop Four Seasons Healthcare’s pioneering dementia care programme.

Four Seasons’ PEARL(Positively Enriching and Enhancing Residents’ Lives)specialised dementia care programme has won numerous awards including one from the Improvement Foundation and is studied by care providers internationally, including countries in Europe Asia and South Africa.

The programme has achieved a reduction averaging 48 per cent in the requirement for antipsychotic medication, together with reductions in a range of other medications. An increase in wellbeing was measured in 46 per cent of people.

Ms Baker called it “an honour to be recognised in this way” and said: “I must acknowledge the dedication of the dementia care teams I have worked with who have demonstrated that with better understanding of how to care for people with dementia we can dramatically reduce the need for medications and improve their wellbeing”.

She worked to develop the PEARL programme in conjunction with former chief executive Dr Pete Calveley and Professor Dawn Brooker, now director of the University of Worcester Association for Dementia Studies.

It was a double celebration for Four Seasons because Christine Smith, manager of the company’s Holybourne Day Centre won the Dementia Care Manager Award.

Four Seasons recently announced plans to establish a national network of homes – initially 370 – with staff trained and accredited to offer specialised dementia care.

Ian Smith, chairman and interim chief executive of Four Seasons Health Care, said: “We are all delighted that Caroline’s work to advance dementia care has been publicly recognised by her peers. The award to Christine Smith as Dementia Care Manager demonstrates that best practice in our homes is making a real difference to the lives of people living with dementia and to their families.”

Mr Smith added: “The principles of the PEARL programme will be fundamental to the nationwide network of specialist dementia care homes that we are developing. We have stepped up our programme of staff training and remodelling homes to create dementia care environments alongside nursing care services. This will help to meet a growing demand with the number of people requiring dementia care projected to grow by around 40 per cent within 15 years.”

Four Seasons Health Care has 56 homes accredited to provide the PEARL dementia service with another 70 currently on the accreditation pathway.

The ethos of PEARL is to see beyond the symptoms of dementia, to recognise each person as individual and support them to live their lives as closely as possible to the way that they always have.

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