Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

In Canada, over 700,000 people are living with dementia. One in four people with dementia will be of Asian origin by 2050, underscoring an urgent need for culturally relevant dementia care education. Current dementia care training resources often lack input from people with lived experiences of dementia, impacting their relevance and authenticity. Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology adopted in healthcare and nursing education. This PhD thesis aims to develop a VR dementia care education toolkit through a three-phase participatory design research approach, involving people with dementia and family partners. This project introduces an innovative approach to dementia care education, moving away from lecture-based formats toward immersive, interactive VR education. The VR toolkit supports the much-needed dementia care education for nursing students and educators, offering experiential learning opportunities. An advisory group with people with dementia and family partners will ensure that the project is inclusive, ethical, and grounded in lived experience. Guided by the design thinking methodology, the first phase explores healthcare experiences and educational needs. In the second phase, diverse partners, including people with dementia, family partners, nursing students and educators, will collaboratively design a VR prototype through two codesign workshops. The final evaluation phase involves rapid prototyping and iterative feedback loops with the advisory group to refine the VR toolkit. This research directly addresses a critical gap in dementia care education, the lack of culturally relevant, experiential learning tools co-created with those who have lived experience. It contributes to advancing the field of dementia education through a participatory design approach, demonstrating how codesign with people with dementia, family partners, nursing students, and educators can promote equitable, culturally safe, and person-centred dementia care.