Ageing better
The Dementia Flagship is part of the National Comprehensive Dementia Centre (NCDC) Network, in which Mindgardens Members UNSW and SESLHD are founding partners. The NCDC is challenging inertia and delays reported by families and developing new models for coordinated care across geriatric medicine, neurology, old age psychiatry, neuroradiology, general practice, allied health and social work.
The Mindgardens Dementia Flagship is also creating opportunities for research participation, including in cognition, therapies and quality of life issues such as driving ability.
Watch this promo video for the ABC’s hit documentary series Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds. Mindgardens is evaluating the intergenerational social experiment through the INTERACTION project.
Statistics
500000
Nearly 500,000 Australians live with dementia.
1.5 million
More than 1.5 million people are carers for someone with dementia
2/3
Two-thirds of people with dementia live in the community
2nd
Dementia is the second leading cause of death
Lived experience shapes everything we do
Mindgardens values the contribution of people with dementia and their families, carers and community members in dementia research that informs healthcare decisions, improvement and policy change and access to services.
How MindLabs contributes
Connecting clinicians, consumers, carers and researchers
Enhancing consumer and carer engagement
Advocacy for system change
Research skill building
Optimisation of research agenda
Developing cross-disciplinary collaborations
Identify new opportunities for synergy and collaboration
Researchers
Dr Stephanie Ward
Dr Stephanie Ward
Dr Stephanie Ward is a geriatrician with strong interests in the diagnosis and management of cognitive decline and dementia. She is committed to improving patient outcomes in her work at the Prince of Wales Hospital Cognitive Disorders Clinic and Geriatric Medicine Outreach Service to residential aged care facilities, a service which she leads. She has applied her clinical perspective to a number of both interventional and observational studies evaluating outcomes in older adults. Notable achievements include preparing questionnaires for a large longitudinal study of nearly 15,000 healthy older Australians participating in the Aspirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly (ASPREE) clinical trial, and instigating the SNORE_ASA ASPREE sub-study that is evaluating the impact of low dose aspirin in sleep apnoea in 1,400 ASPREE participants.
Dr Ward is also the Clinical Lead of the NHMRC funded Australian Dementia Network Clinical Quality registry that is in the process of recruiting memory clinics nationally for a pilot phase. As the onscreen geriatrician for the ABC television’s hit factual series, Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds, Dr Ward is a strong advocate for greater opportunities for intergenerational activities and for further research to investigate scalable models of care in this area.
Associate Professor Ruth Peters
Associate Professor Ruth Peters
Associate Professor Ruth Peters uses clinical trials, evidence synthesis and observational studies to develop understanding of risk factors for cognitive decline, dementia and frailty and ways to reduce this risk.
Following the completion of her PhD at Imperial College London she was awarded a UK National Institute of Health Research Post-Doctoral Fellowship prior to moving to Australia in 2018. She has led numerous teams delivering high profile evidence synthesis work in the area of dementia and healthy ageing and has a particular interest in cardiovascular risk factors including hypertension. In particular, she was the dementia lead for the award winning multinational Hypertension in the Very Elderly Trial (HYVET, HYVET-COG) and both her work in hypertension and evidence synthesis are cited widely in the academic literature and by national, international and WHO clinical practice and health guidelines.
INTERACTION: Intergenerational clinical trial in at risk older adults and pre-school children
The Clinical Course of Bipolar Disorder
Mindgardens Neuroscience Network acknowledges the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures, and to Elders past, present and emerging.
We acknowledge the voices of people with lived experience, their carers, families and kinship groups. We recognise the expertise acquired through living with a mental health, drug and alcohol or neurological disorder and acknowledge those who care for people on their recovery journey. We place lived experience at the heart of all that we do.
Brings together the strengths of four founding organisations
