We congratulate Dr Ron Mason who graduated with a PhD in August. Supervised by Dr Kathleen Doherty, Dr Claire Eccleston and Prof Andrew Robinson, Ron’s PhD “Confidence and Attitudes of General Practitioners towards dementia” was the culmination of a major research project focussed on General Practitioner (GP) education. His thesis investigated whether appropriately targeted educational programs improved attitudes and confidence of GPs and GP registrars toward the identification, diagnosis and management of dementia. Over the course of his PhD, Ron developed a new tool to measure attitudes and confidence towards dementia called the General Practitioners’ Confidence and Attitude Scale for Dementia (GPACS-D).
This project commenced in 2014 and involved more than 450 GPs and registrars in 4 states.
Ron found that, for both experienced GPs and those in training, significant improvements in confidence in clinical abilities, attitudes to care and engagement resulted from well-designed education which included the lived experience of dementia. For most people living with dementia, GPs have an important role to play, and improvements in attitudes and confidence may be an important step to delivering timely diagnosis of dementia.
If you are interested in reading some of the research arising out of this study (Mason, R., Doherty, K., Eccleston, C., Winbolt, M., Long, M. and Robinson, A., 2020. Effect of a dementia education intervention on the confidence and attitudes of general practitioners in Australia: a pre-test post-test study. BMJ open, 10(1)) you can link to it here https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/1/e033218.
