This edited volume takes a welcome approach to review current issues in dementia care, providing a broad-based view of the conceptualisation of dementia, policy and practice. The editors devote space to developments in national contexts as far apart as the Deep South of the USA, Malta and India, as well as Europe, giving readers a chance to compare notes and pick up tips. They have taken care to attend to the voices of people with dementia and to grassroots initiatives as well as overarching perspectives, bringing the subject matter closer to home for the average practitioner than many more erudite volumes. In today's language this could be described as a volume concerned with knowledge transfer and impact.
The collection of chapters grew from a 21st birthday celebration for the ground-breaking Dementia Services Development Centre at the University of Stirling. As such, the material seems to have an element of serendipity rather than a priori intention. This leads to some odd bedfellows: a useful scholarly chapter reviewing evidence for population-level influences on dementia (chapter 3), for example, is close neighbours with another that reviews development and implementation of dementia policies in France (chapter 6) from a much more narrative and personal perspective.
Reading about implementation of policy and theory in practice leads to the exposure of a number of thought-provoking ‘gaps’. These include the ‘dementia gap’, a term given by the Alzheimer's Society to the difference between the number of people estimated to have dementia and the number who have received a diagnosis (see chapter 4), and policy practice gaps revealed in the chapters on strategy, which include a fluent and honest account of the situation in England (chapter 5). We also learn about the research gap between technologically developed and developing societies, reflected in the name of the 10/66 Dementia Research Group (a name chosen to reflect that only 10% of dementia research is directed towards the 66% of people with dementia living in low- and middle-income countries); and on another level, chapter 11 shows us the gulf between the levels of physical activity that those in dementia care deserve to have and those they actually do have.
Overall, it is refreshing to read a book in which the focus is on the real world, in which we struggle to implement policy and provide the best possible services. If you like to take a reasonably easy-reading but work-related volume on holiday, this would be a good one to put in your suitcase.
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