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Around 982,000 people are living with dementia in the UK right now. By 2040, that figure is expected to reach 1.4 million. In many care homes across England, 70 to 80% of residents already have a dementia diagnosis. It is no longer a specialist subset of the population you care for. For most services, it is the majority.
And yet, in March 2026, CQC published a landmark research report on good practice in dementia care, commissioned as part of its formal dementia strategy and the findings were quite frank. Health and social care staff do not always understand the specific, personal care needs of people living with dementia. Care environments frequently do not support people’s wellbeing. And there remains a striking gap between services delivering genuinely good dementia care and those simply managing the condition without truly understanding it.
CQC data reveals that care homes where the majority of residents have dementia experience more than double the serious injury notifications compared to homes with lower dementia prevalence. That is not a coincidence but a direct consequence of a sector still catching up with the complexity of dementia as a lived experience, not just a clinical diagnosis.
The good news is that CQC also documented what good looks like and we will be discussing that in this post alongside other useful tips on how to support people living with dementia.
Let’s go through each of the steps together.
Understand the Person Behind the Dementia Diagnosis
Before you think about how to manage someone’s dementia, take time to understand who they are. The diagnosis tells you something about what is happening in someone’s brain. It tells you very little about the person living inside that experience.
The person in your care has a life history that stretches back decades before you met them. They have had careers, relationships, passions, daily habits, opinions, and preferences that shaped who they are.
Dementia does not erase all of that, it changes how it is expressed. A person who cannot tell you where they are may still light up when you put on a particular piece of music. Someone who struggles to find words may become animated when you bring out photographs from their working life.
Your first job in supporting someone living with dementia is to know them as a person, not just as a patient.
Here are the first few things you need to find out:
- What did they do for work, and if they still seek out tasks that echo that identity
- What music do they love, what food reminds them of home, and how they prefer to spend their time
- If the person is a morning person or an evening person
- Who in their family matters most to them, and how they prefer to be addressed
- What calms them when they are distressed, and what makes things worse
None of this is soft background information. It is clinical data that will shape the quality of the care you deliver.
Research consistently shows that when care is shaped around a person’s individual history and preferences, distress reduces, medication use decreases, and quality of life measurably improves.
Build this knowledge into the care plan from the beginning, ideally alongside the person themselves and the family members who know them best.
Maintaining a consistent daily routine is also part of respecting who someone is. Keeping regular times for waking, meals, medication, and bedtime also reduces confusion and anxiety for someone whose ability to track time and anticipate what comes next has been disrupted by dementia.
Communicate in a Way That Reaches Them
The way you communicate with someone living with dementia has a direct and measurable effect on their wellbeing and intensity of the distress that you and your colleagues may have to manage.
Most communication difficulties in dementia care are not caused by dementia alone. They are caused by communication approaches that do not account for how dementia affects the way a person processes and responds to language.
Here are some communication approaches you can apply when communicating with people living with dementia:
- Slow down and get to their level before you speak:
Make eye contact before you say anything. Get to the same physical level, for example, sitting rather than standing over them. Use the person’s name. Speak in short, clear sentences using plain words. - Offer choices, not open questions:
Open-ended questions place a cognitive demand on someone that may be genuinely overwhelming but a simple, specific choice allows the person to respond easily without requiring them to generate options from scratch. - Give them time to respond:
Processing time in dementia is slow so after saying something, wait. Do not fill the silence, do not rephrase the question before they have had a chance to respond, and do not answer on their behalf. - Validate the feeling, not the fact:
When supporting a dementia patient, reassuring matters more than you think. For instance, If the person tells you their mother is coming to collect them, do not tell them their mother died forty years ago (if she did). Instead, validate their feelings because the distress that follows that correction is real and immediate.
Similarly, avoid phrases like “don’t you remember?” or “I just told you.” The person is not choosing to forget. Pointing out the gap creates shame and distress without improving anything.
Create an Environment That Works for Them
The physical environment of a dementia care setting either actively supports the people living in it or quietly works against them.
Most standard care environments are designed for operational efficiency like staff movement, cleaning schedules, and equipment storage rather than for the cognitive and sensory experience of someone living with dementia.
The difference between a dementia-supportive environment and a standard one is significant and directly affects how settled, independent, and safe your residents feel.
Here are the things to prioritise when creating an environment that works for people living with dementia:
- Reduce hazards without over-restricting:
Clear clutter from walkways. Secure loose rugs and ensure flooring transitions are clearly visible. Keep medication, cleaning products, and other things out of reach and out of sight.
Install handrails in bathrooms and along key corridors. These are basic safety measures, but the way you implement them matters. Removing every risk also removes every opportunity for independence, and a service that locks everything away in the name of safety while restricting the person’s ability to move freely and make choices is creating a different kind of harm. - Use the environment to communicate:
People with dementia often retain the ability to recognise images well after word recognition begins to decline.
Clear, simple signage with images alongside words (a picture of a toilet on the bathroom door, a photograph of food on the dining room door) significantly reduces confusion and helps them navigate their own space with less anxiety and less need to ask for help. - Manage light and routine to address sundowning.
Sundowning is simply the confusion, restlessness, and distress that many people with dementia experience in the late afternoon and early evening. To support them through this, encourage outdoor time during the morning and early afternoon, combined with a calm, predictable evening routine.
If your service has residents who become consistently distressed in the late afternoon, review how much natural light they are getting earlier in the day before reaching for any other intervention.
Study and Recognise The Person’s Behaviour
Behaviour is communication. A person living with dementia who is restless, calling out, refusing care, becoming aggressive, or withdrawing is telling you something. They are not doing these things to make your shift harder. They are doing them because something is wrong, something is missing, something is frightening them, or something in their body or environment is creating a need they cannot express in words.
Your job and this is one of the hardest parts of dementia care is to treat every change in behaviour as a message and to work out what it is saying.
Start with the physical. Pain is consistently under-identified in people with dementia because the person cannot reliably self-report it. Agitation, resistance to care, changes in facial expression, unusual posture, and disturbed sleep are all potential signs of pain. Before assuming a behaviour is dementia-related, check for physical causes.
Then look at the environment. Is it too noisy, too bright, too crowded? Has something changed in the person’s routine that has removed something familiar and replaced it with something uncertain? Have they had enough meaningful activity today, or have they spent hours sitting in front of a television programme they cannot follow?
Then look at the interaction. Did a care worker rush a task? Was personal care delivered in a way that felt undignified or frightening? Was the person asked to do something they lacked the capacity to understand or consent to?
After you’ve gathered all of these, record your observations in detail and create a response plan should live in the care plan, be known by every member of the team, and be updated as the person’s needs change.
One final point that does not get said often enough. Your own wellbeing matters here too. Supporting someone living with dementia is emotionally demanding work. There will be shifts that exhaust you in ways that are hard to explain to someone who has never done it.
- Ask for help when you need it.
- Use supervision to process difficult interactions rather than absorbing them silently.
- Take your breaks.
- If your service has access to respite or peer support, use it.
You cannot give good care from an empty place.
Remember this: Good dementia care is not a set of techniques you apply to a condition. It is a way of relating to a person with curiosity, patience, and a genuine commitment to understanding who they are and what they need, rather than simply managing what they do.
Every person living with dementia in your care deserves to be known as an individual and supported accordingly, not just on the day of an inspection, but on every ordinary day when nobody is watching except the person in front of you.
If you want to learn more about how to support people living with dementia;
➡️ Explore our free resources here
➡️ Enrol on the Level 3 Certificate in Dementia Care
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