ABSTRACT
The fi gures are staggering. For any given disorder, people with dementia have four to six times the mortality than the cognitively intact (Morrison and Siu, 2000). People with dementia often live for many years after their diagnosis. It is considered sensible to make end-of-life care plans well in advance of someone entering the end-of-life phase, but effective end-of-life care is essentially focused person-centred care. This was considered in Chapter 6 for all aspects of living well with dementia. Effective communication is also critical, and this will be considered in Chapter 12 for all aspects of living well with dementia. Many people have a rôle to play in end-of-life care – a GP, district nurses, care staff, speech and language therapists, to name a few – so the network can be large. One of the most critical aspects to good end-of-life care is making sure that each member of the care team communicates reliably with others in the team. Without good information-sharing across explicit and implicit ‘barriers to communication’, a person is less likely to receive the care they need, and this inevitably is going to have an impact on their quality of care.
