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Background

EVIDEM is the short title for a programme of research funded by the National Institute for Health Research practice in dementia care in the community: developing and testing evidence-based interventions, from timely diagnosis to end of life”.

Advocacy organisations, researchers and practitioners have long complained about the limited funding for dementia research in the UK. Funding seemed to fail to address significant gaps in knowledge by favouring biomedical studies rather than health services or social care research.

This situation is changing because dementia is rising up the research agenda, and funding streams are appearing not only for basic sciences research but also for social and organisational studies.

We now have an increasingly integrated research and development process, with a dementia research agenda emerging from the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a government-funded UK wide research infrastructure developing for Dementias and Neurodegenerative Diseases (DeNDRoN) and substantial funding for programmes of dementia research being awarded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR ).

The first wave of NIHR programmes had an explicit remit to improve services, and therefore favoured non-pharmacological therapies and studies that could demonstrate relevance for practice. One of these, Evidence-based interventions in dementia (EVIDEM), is a five year, £2 million programme which contains five projects run by a multi-disciplinary group of researchers.

The inclusiveness of the EVIDEM proposal was a winning characteristic for the EVIDEM team, injecting a ‘real life’ dimension to research and development by joining together projects along the trajectory of the disease process, from diagnosis to end-of-life care.

So was its base in north London, with its diverse population and often fragmented services; if practice can be changed in London, it can be changed anywhere. The programme’s host, Central & North West London NHS Foundation Trust, exemplified the promise of grounded research & development.

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EVIDEM is funded by the National Institute for Health Research: Programme Grant for Applied Research (RP-PG-0606-1005)