ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which dementia was recognised and assigned to older patients within these wards. It founds that it underwent a series of transformations that both produced and reproduced it as a public, taken-for-granted, and everyday diagnosis. The chapter aims to explore the consequences for patients and for the wards themselves. Thus, ‘dementia’ exists in multiple versions, is produced and reproduced in multiple sites, and through multiple specialist and non-specialist, clinical, and biomedical frames, which are, in turn, further shaped by public policies and everyday cultural understandings. The assessment of older patients where a diagnosis of dementia was suspected occurred frequently within these wards. Reductive understandings and recognition of categories of patients were visible in the everyday cultures of naming and labelling practices that pervaded everyday talk within these wards. Dementia appeared to overshadow as a default diagnosis for many older people within these wards, particularly if their admitting condition reduced their current capacity or mobility.
