Responding to people facing dementia: Improving interprofessional learning and practice in aging societies

Abstract: This multidisciplinary panel will discuss a new open-access report that foreground the needs, concerns, and choices of people facing dementia as a moral challenge for aging societies and an interprofessional learning imperative and improvement opportunity for health care providers. Most people with dementia care live outside of institutions; education and innovation concerning how to support better lives and choices for people facing dementia, and for caregivers, must engage audiences beyond hospitals. These issues are central to what it means to be human, given that ideas and values concerning what it is like to live with dementia are often accompanied by stigma, misinformation, and stark inequities in care financing. Speaker 1, a bioethics and health humanities researcher and lead editor of the report, will introduce the work in the context of ongoing research on the bioethics of aging and dementia, and will moderate discussion. Speaker 2, a health policy expert and dementia researcher, will present the report’s landscape review of ethical, legal, medical, and social considerations concerning hastening death in the context of a dementia diagnosis. Speaker 3, a physician and health care professionalism expert, will discuss the landscape review’s applications to interprofessionalism concerning evolving questions in primary care, hospice, and other contexts. Speaker 4, a medical anthropologist, will share empirical bioethics insights informing another paper in this report, with attention to education concerning conversations with people facing dementia.