Aligning Dementia Care Science With the Urgent Need for Dissemination and Implementation

With more than 6 million individuals living with dementia in the United States, 11 million family caregivers, and a majority of persons with dementia ultimately residing in an assisted living community or nursing home,1 providing quality dementia care across disease stages and settings is a public health imperative. Family caregivers are called on to provide extensive assistance to relatives with dementia, long-term care staff typically lack sufficient knowledge to most effectively attend to residents’ cognitive and psychosocial challenges, and optimal models of dementia care often involve providers and services that are not effectively incorporated into the health care delivery system.