Quality of care in private sector and NHS facilities for people with dementia: cross sectional survey.

Residential and nursing homes provide an essential contribution towards the care of people with dementia. It is a challenge to provide good care within tight budgets and often with a workforce that has little formal training. Most people are cared for within the private sector, although a limited number of NHS beds provide continuing care for people with severe dementia and intractable behaviour problems. Dementia care mapping is a direct, standardised assessment with good interrater reliability. Activities are coded according to category of behaviour, and they are recorded every five minutes. Wellbeing is measured using the dementia care index, which indicates the overall quality of care within a particular environment extrapolated from dementia care mapping evaluations of half of the residents. We used dementia care mapping to evaluate the quality of care in 10 private sector and seven NHS care facilities.