Kudos to Eleanor McConnell and her entire team for the submission of her Duke CTSI Population Health Improvement Co-Development application entitled “Co-Developing a Personal Outcomes Approach to Improving Wellbeing in People Living with Dementia” with the Dementia Inclusive Durham as a community partner. This proposal requests funding for a one-year period with a start date of July 1, 2018.

Dementia-Inclusive-Durham (DID) and Duke will examine the feasibility of adapting the Personal Outcomes Approach (POA) to promote wellbeing among people living with dementia in the US. DID and Duke will co-develop an adapted POA-US intervention and field test it with people affected by dementia. Dementia directly affects 1/10th of people over age 65 and indirectly affects family, care partners, and the broader community. The POA-US will help professionals work with persons living with dementia and their care partners to identify, prioritize, and honor personal preferences, exchange information regarding the person's preferred outcomes, and maintain a focus on the person’s life-story, rather than on diagnosis. The network negotiates how the community can support care focused on priority outcomes across care settings. Project deliverables include a process for implementing the co-developed POA-US within community care settings, and field test results from community participants.

Three specific objectives for the funding period will drive our work, as described below. 1. Co-develop the Personal Outcomes Approach – US version (POA-US) intervention and a related training manual and evaluation plan to implement a culturally appropriate US-based version of the Personal Outcomes Approach using “Design Thinking” methods [9-10]. 2. Train selected staff at Charles House Association and Durham community members aligned with DID on the POA-US, to understand outcomes that matter to the person living with dementia and members of their social networks, and to co-create ways to achieve these personal outcomes. 3. Conduct a field test of the POA-US intervention by gathering and analyze data from participants involved in implementing the POA-US approach (people living with dementia in the West End neighborhood of Durham, care partners, staff, community volunteers) regarding the process of learning and implementing the exchange model of assessment embedded in the POA-US approach, to evaluate feasibility and explore value-added to existing care approaches. Our long-range objective is to use the co-developed intervention, feedback on training experience, and feasibility data from this project as the foundation for an R-level proposal to the National Institutes of Health to be submitted in February, 2020. Specifically, we plan to conduct a pragmatic trial of the POA-US on improving wellbeing among people living with dementia and members of their social network. Development of the POA-US intervention also will enrich a variety of DID activities, specified under the section follow-on funding.