Research visit by Chiba University Hospitals, Japan

On 10th October 2014, the Division of Rehabilitation and Ageing, the School of Health Sciences, and the Nottingham University Hospitals and Nottinghamshire Healthcare trusts hosted a visit by a multi-disciplinary delegation of 10 visitors from Chiba University , Japan to the specialist medical and mental health unit (ward B47 at the Queen's Medical Centre) and and the University where they heard about our associated research.

Chiba is a large city of 900,000 inhabitants, 40km from Tokyo and, as most people know, Japan is a highly aged population with large numbers of people with dementia. As in the UK, their hospitals have large numbers of older people with dementia in them. Thus, the opportunity to view our specialist unit, and hear about the first randomised controlled trial of such a unit in the world that we conducted was of great value to them. They were interested to see how our unit enabled best practice dementia and delirium care to be delivered through a partnership between the University and local trusts, and were impressed to see that this improved the quality of care and of satisfaction with care. They were even more impressed by the finding that this is cost-effective, despite the extra staffing required.

They were delighted to leave each with a memory stick of all the publications arising from the research programme in which the specialist unit was studied (NIHR PGfAR Medical Crises in Older People) and a copy of our cinematic documentary of the specialist unit (“Today is Monday”). The proceeds from the donation given to us by the Chiba team were passed to the Nottingham University Hospitals trust charity, in recognition of the support it has given to our work in the past.

To find out more about this research, see www.nottingham.ac.uk/mcop or contact john.gladman@nottingham.ac.uk, rowan.harwood@nuh.nhs.uk or sarah.goldberg@nottingham.ac.uk