Care Inspectors in Sweden and Talking Mats

This blog is about how Care Inspectors in Sweden are using Talking Mats.

On 18th March I met up with old friends – Ulrika Ferm and Eva Holmqvist – at the ISAAC Denmark Conference in the beautiful Vingsted Conference Centre in West Denmark. Ulrika and Eva work at DART Communication Centre in Gothenburg Sweden http://www.dart-gbg.org/english/.

I was giving a presentation on new developments in Talking Mats and as always happens when we meet, we talked non stop about families and work.

Ulrika told me about the following initiative in Sweden and we agreed it would be useful to write a blog about it.
The Health and Social Care Inspectorate https://www.ivo.se/ (the Swedish equivalent of the Care Commission) had been in touch with DART about how they could get the views of people with dementia who live in care homes.

DART made a program of communication for the inspectors which included a first day about communication and dementia. Following this there was a full 2 day course on Talking Mats for 15 inspectors who then went on to pilot the use of Talking Mats as a way to get the genuine views of residents. It was so successful that they are planning to roll this out elsewhere. Now more inspectors in Sweden are getting Talking Mats training and using pictorial support as preparations before inspections.

It would be really good if this could happen in Scotland.