Dementia now kills more Australians than any other condition, and that number is set to double within 25 years. For decades it sat in the shadows of aged care conversations – misunderstood, under-discussed, treated as someone else’s problem. That’s shifting.
“More than roughly half of all people living in residential aged care will have some form of cognitive impairment,” says Dr Isabelle Meyer, Executive Director of Dementia Training Australia (DTA). “This is the reality now.”
Whatever your role in aged care, that statistic means one thing: dementia knowledge sits at the centre of the job, not on its edges.
Updated WHO guidelines put a number on something carers have long suspected: up to 45% of dementia cases can be prevented or slowed with the right approach.
“What we know is that those strategies for preventing the illness are also the strategies we need to use to delay the progression of the more severe symptoms once you have a diagnosis,” Meyer says.
None of this lives in a policy document. Diet. Movement. Social contact. How a room is laid out. Whether a chronic condition is being managed properly. These are the levers, and they’re pulled by the people doing hands-on care every day – not by anyone sitting in a boardroom.
DTA has run free, government-funded dementia training since 2016, covering everything from behaviour support to environmental design.
“Yes, we need to be able to empower [carers] with the knowledge and skills, but also the resilience they need to keep going,” Meyer says.
Roughly 1.7 million Australians are caring for someone with dementia right now, whether that’s a paid role or a family responsibility. Pull family carers out of the equation and the formal system doesn’t hold.
“Caring for someone living with dementia, no matter what your care setting, is a team sport,” Meyer says. “And as a carer, you need to know that you are not alone.”
DTA’s Caring at Home hub gives families something concrete to work with at home. For aged care workers, it’s also a practical referral, a way to extend support past the walls of a facility and keep families and formal carers on the same page.
Tom Kitwood, the social psychologist behind person-centred dementia care, coined a phrase worth sitting with: carers as “world makers.” His point was that dementia isn’t shaped by neurology alone: the people and environment around someone matter just as much.
Meyer puts it plainly: “A carer makes the world for someone living with dementia. So whilst that’s a profound responsibility, it’s also an extraordinary gift.”
Skip the training and support behind that responsibility, though, and burnout follows, even for carers who’ve been doing this for years.
Behaviour rarely escalates without warning. Staff who know what to watch for can step in early instead of managing a crisis after it’s already happened.
“It’s a really powerful and important superpower that we try to train all carers to have,” Meyer says.
Discomfort, environmental stress, confusion – the usual suspects show up again and again – but never in quite the same way twice. That’s the case for ongoing training over a single induction session.
Most carers currently figure this out through trial and error. Structured training turns that guesswork into something repeatable and reliable.
“The best way to support a carer is to make sure that they are well trained,” Meyer says. “So they have, at their fingertips, the knowledge and skills they need to do what they need to do. There is no greater gift and support than we can offer.”
More than 425,000 Australians are currently living with dementia. This isn’t a niche skill set – it’s foundational to aged care work, full stop.
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