Dr Angela Clifford, Faculty of Education, Health and Wellbeing

Dr Angela Clifford has worked as a Research Associate in the Centre for Health and Social Care Improvement since 2011. With a background in Psychology, she completed her PhD at Loughborough University in 2013 investigating the relationship between physical activity and cognition in later life. Angela’s current research is in the fields of healthy ageing and dementia. She has been working alongside Prof Ruoling Chen researching determinants of dementia risk and informal care using data from a cohort study in China while also completing a number of consultancy projects and participatory evaluations for external partners of the University. The team recently published a paper in BMJ Open investigating the prevalence and determinants of undetected dementia which has informed Angela’s subsequent work. Angela is particularly interested in exploring the roles and experiences of family caregivers to people living with dementia and how these develop and change over time. Alongside her research, Angela is a member of the Centre for Applied Research and Education (CARE) in Dementia and works within the University and the community to promote dementia friendly strategies. She also teaches on a number of courses in Health and Psychology and supervises doctoral students in Health and in Art & Design.

Help-seeking among family caregivers to people showing early signs of dementia – a preliminary qualitative study

 Dementia is a major public health challenge and is becoming increasingly so as the population ages, yet the level of dementia detection is particularly low with less than half of people with dementia having a diagnosis. With the majority of people with dementia living in the community, detection is crucial to support health and social care planning and to reduce inequalities in diagnosis, health care and outcomes. The most common trigger of a clinical examination for dementia is a relative’s concern about the person’s memory loss. However, in the UK the average time between early signs becoming apparent and receiving a diagnosis is around 2.5 years and little is known about the perspectives of family caregivers during this time or how they make a decision about seeking help for their loved one. The aims of this project are to expand on previous work to explore and describe the journey towards help-seeking by family caregivers to people showing early signs of dementia, to uncover barriers to help-seeking, and to identify possible opportunities to offer support and subsequently reduce the delay to diagnosis. This project will involve systematic review, development of a working model of help-seeking among caregivers to people with dementia, and semi-structured interviews with caregivers themselves. These three components will be drawn together to present insights into help-seeking among this caregiver group and provide recommendations for practice and future research.