ABSTRACT
This chapter examines care interactions between care workers and those with dementia in residential care. We describe the various strategies care workers deploy in their daily work to illustrate different ways for balancing multiple demands, such as the care and personal needs of residents with dementia and the emotional work involved in care in the context of the role and effects of regulation on aged and dementia care services. By drawing together our research with literature on person-centred care and emotional labour, two strategies become evident. The first – misattention – captures the way in which care organisations and their workers attend to regulatory processes, rather than the person, as a means to cope with competing demands, uncertainty and emotional care. We show how this approach restricts meaningful interactions. We can then propose a refreshing theoretical approach to dementia care by contrasting this with a second, more creative strategy – seeing individuals and so called ‘dementia-related behaviours’ as puzzles. Through this approach, care workers combine empathic understanding and professional distancing to solve in more meaningful and rewarding ways the puzzle that dementia and dementia care presents. As a result, dementia ‘behaviours’ and care interactions are better understood.
