Commentary: Launching ‘Namaste Care’ in Canada: findings from training sessions and initial perceptions of an end-of-life programme for people with advanced dementia

The research paper entitled ‘Launching “Namaste Care” in Canada: findings from training sessions and initial perceptions of an end-of-life programme for people with advanced dementia’ will be of interest to an international readership in the area of dementia, palliative and end-of-life care. The authors uniquely underscored the significance of both the experiences of implementing the programme and the necessity of training to appropriately prepare those involved in the implementation.

The care received by patients with advanced dementia has been questioned for many years and has remained problematic to date, in terms of impact on quality of life, even as advanced dementia is becoming a leading cause of death across the world (Etkind et al., 2017; World Health Organisation, 2017). Undoubtedly, within palliative and end-of-life care, attention paid to healthcare professionals’ moral duty of care, which embodies an obligation in maintaining ethical standards within care provision through identifying training needs and undertaking necessary training, is vital to enhancing patients/service users’ care and quality of life (Arrey et al., 2019). Likewise, it has been suggested that training is important for launching new care programmes like Namaste Care (Cronfalk et al., 2015).

Of interest is how the authors of the reviewed paper expanded upon these views. They convincingly and aptly utilised the vehicles of training sessions, public lecture and interviews with participants to qualitatively scope staff preparedness and experiences of early implementation of the programme within two Canadian Long-Term Care (LTC) homes. They reported balanced findings that portrayed both barriers to and facilitators of the implementation of the programme, but also highlighted wider positive implications in terms of better understanding of the purpose of programme, how care will be delivered, and the identified holistic benefits to patients/service users.

Their concluding assertion advocating ‘the use of a facility-wide educational programme to help launch a new innovation in LTC’ is important. It has implications for informing research and practice aligned with future programming of such advanced dementia-tailored care.

Daringly, one can suggest that effective training and successful provision of advanced dementia care programmes in LTC homes are mutually cohesive, and cannot be considered as disconnected components removed from the holistic context of staff skill-sets, family understanding, quality care provision and service users’/patients’ satisfaction.

Biography

Sally K Arrey is a Senior Lecturer in Nursing at the School of Human and Health Sciences, Department of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Huddersfield, UK.