The National Dementia Workforce Study

ABSTRACT: Overall The National Dementia Workforce Study (NDWS) will be launched by a national team of experts in clinical care of persons living with dementia, survey research, and health workforce research. The goal of the NDWS data infrastructure is to allow researchers and policymakers to ask and answer scientific questions to help build the workforce of clinicians and other professional care providers required by the growing population of persons living with dementia in the U.S. The core of NDWS will be four surveys that reflect key elements of the professional dementia care workforce in the U.S.: Community Clinicians, Nursing Home Staff, Home Care Staff, and Assisted Living Staff. In addition to these surveys, the NDWS team will develop a variety of additional data sources that can be linked with the surveys in order to maximize the scientific potential of the surveys. The NDWS team includes the country’s leading dementia care, workforce, and survey researchers as Co-Investigators and Consultants, and the project’s activities will be conducted through five cores: 1) Administrative (Lead: Donovan Maust, MD, MS, and Co-Lead: Joanne Spetz, PhD); 2) Screening and Survey Instrument Development (Co-Leads: Joanne Spetz, PhD, and James Wagner, PhD); 3) Administrative Data Transfer, Masking, Access, and Ethics (Lead: Steven Marcus, PhD); 4) Data Collection, Linkages, Cleaning, and Sharing (Lead: James Wagner, PhD); and 5) Research Studies (Lead: Laura Wagner, PhD, RN). The overall aims are to: 1) Launch a family of four nationally representative professional dementia workforce surveys covering the key care delivery settings in the U.S.; 2) Through the National Dementia Workforce Study, build a data infrastructure surrounding the dementia workforce surveys that allows researchers to generate critical insights into the professional dementia care workforce and associated outcomes for PLWD; and 3) Develop and expand the community of researchers focused on the professional dementia care workforce overall and that use the National Dementia Workforce Study data infrastructure.