Project Updates

We have now held three workshops which led to 'Top 10' priorities for dementia and brain health research, identified with members of this Somali community. We invite researchers, and services, to consider these. The priority questions are broad topics but there may be aspects that could form the basis of future research studies or service developments.  

We are keen for dementia related research and service developments that can benefit UK Somali communities, and improve their experience of the dementia service and care pathway. 

To develop the priorities we held three workshops. 

The first workshop was a consultation and listening event. It involved 34 community members. These people were family carers of people living with dementia or memory difficulties, people worried about their own memory or having dementia themselves or people interested to learn more about brain health and dementia. Discussions identified lots of topics of uncertainty and questions about dementia and brain health.

We then grouped these questions into broader topics, to guide a search of the existing evidence. We identified gaps in knowledge and what research has already been done.  

This illustration summarises what we found.  

If you would like more information about the evidence we found, please contact Becky b.field@sheffield.ac.uk

We talked about the knowledge gaps we had found in another Workshop (Workshop 2). For this workshop we had 15 participants. This included men and women, some who were carers for people with dementia or memory concerns, some over 65 and some interested in brain health and dementia. We asked participants to discuss 17 different possible research priorities, based on these knowledge gaps. We asked particpiants to vote for which they thought were most important, to get to a 'Top 10'. 

For Workshop 3, the same participants came. We asked them to discuss the 'Top 10' priorities we had identified after counting the votes. These are pictures summarising what participants talked about in Workshop 3, when we were discussing the final priorities.