Welcome to Outstanding Dementia Care — A Resource Built by People in the Sector, for People in the Sector

If you have landed here, there is a good chance you are a care home manager, a registered provider, a deputy, or someone knee-deep in the day-to-day reality of dementia care. Maybe you are trying to keep up with the latest research while simultaneously dealing with a staffing gap, a CQC notification, and someone family member ringing for the fourth time today. Sound familiar?

That is exactly why this site exists.

Why We Built This

Dementia care in the UK is at a genuinely exciting — and genuinely challenging — crossroads right now. There are currently over 512,000 people with a recorded dementia diagnosis in England alone, and that number keeps climbing. Projections put us well over a million affected individuals by 2025, costing the NHS £6.3 billion annually. The pressure on care providers has never been greater.

At the same time, there is actually loads of really promising stuff happening. The 2024 Lancet Commission identified two new dementia risk factors — untreated vision loss and high cholesterol — adding to the twelve already identified, which include smoking, excessive alcohol, and hypertension. New disease-modifying drugs are moving through the system (even if they have not landed on the NHS just yet), and blood tests that could diagnose dementia far earlier are in development. The NHS 10-year plan, published in 2025, promises a modern service framework for frailty and dementia that would set clearer standards and help local services coordinate better.

The science is moving fast. But how much of that actually filters down to the people on the ground — the managers, the seniors, the keyworkers — in a way that is actually useful? Honestly? Not enough.

That is the gap Outstanding Dementia Care is here to fill.

What You Will Find Here

This is not going to be a site full of dry academic papers or generic tick-box advice. Think of it more like sitting down with a colleague who has done the reading so you do not have to — someone who will tell you what actually matters, what it means for your service, and how to make it work in the real world.

Here is what we are building:

Research, made readable. We will pull the most important studies and guidance and translate them into plain English. What does the latest Alzheimer Society research mean for how you are running your dementia unit? What should you know about person-centred care approaches that CQC inspectors are actively looking for? We will cover it all.

Blogs from the sector. Care home managers, nurses, activities coordinators, family carers — people with real experience sharing real ideas. If you have found something that works, we want to hear from you.

A directory of dementia services. Finding the right support, training, or specialist service should not be a three-hour Google job. We are building a proper directory so you can find what you need quickly.

Downloadable courses and ebooks. Practical, affordable training resources you can use with your team — without needing a training budget the size of a small country.

Links to platforms built specifically for care providers. More on those below.

Three Platforms Worth Knowing About

As part of Outstanding Dementia Care, we will be shining a light on tools that have been genuinely built with care providers in mind — not generic software that has been awkwardly re-skinned for the sector. Over the next three blogs, we will be doing a deep dive into each of these. But here is a quick introduction:

The Listening Pod (thelisteningpod.com) is a platform designed around something that sits right at the heart of Outstanding dementia care — listening. Not the clipboard-and-tick-box kind. The kind that actually captures the voice of the person living with dementia. More on this one very soon, because it is genuinely brilliant.

Care Documentation Audit (caredocumentationaudit.co.uk) is an AI-powered tool that reviews your care plans, risk assessments, and other documentation against CQC Outstanding practice characteristics. If the thought of an inspector reading through your care files makes your stomach drop a little, this is the kind of thing you need in your governance toolkit. You can even try it for free. We will be walking through exactly how it works in an upcoming blog.

Care Home Surveys (carehomesurveys.online) is a professional survey platform built for care providers. Getting meaningful feedback from residents, families, and staff — and being able to show CQC that you are acting on it — is one of those things that separates a Good from an Outstanding. Again, we will be covering this properly in the coming weeks.

This Is a Space for the Sector

Outstanding dementia care does not happen because of a policy document or a training video. It happens because the right people have the right knowledge, the right tools, and enough support to actually use them.

That is what we are building here — a proper resource for people who are serious about getting dementia care right.

Bookmark us, share us with your team, and if you have got something worth sharing — a practice that is working, a question the sector needs to be asking, or an idea for a blog — get in touch. This site grows with you.

Right, that is enough from us for now. More soon.

Outstanding Dementia Care is a UK resource site for dementia care providers. All content is written with CQC inspection criteria in mind and is aimed at registered managers, providers, and care teams working in England.