Our Helpline has been shortlisted for a prestigious award

The Admiral Nurse Dementia Helpline has been shortlisted for a ‘Commitment to Carers Award’ at the RCNi Nurse Awards, due to take place on July 4th. The RCNi is the publications and education department of the Royal College of Nursing, and the RCNi Awards is their annual celebration of excellence amongst nurses in the UK.

The Admiral Nurse Dementia Helpline is Dementia UK’s national Helpline, offering free, seven-day-a-week specialist advice to families facing dementia, on the phone or over email. Staffed entirely by trained dementia specialist Admiral Nurses, callers to the Helpline will speak to someone with the time and expertise to understand their needs and suggest practical solutions, to what can be highly complex situations.

The Helpline team of 32 Admiral Nurses were shortlisted from over 700 other groups or individual nurses. Four others have been nominated in the category and the winners will be announced at a ceremony at the Westminster Park Plaza Hotel, London on Wednesday 4th July.

As dementia diagnoses are becoming more and more common, and awareness of the Helpline grows, demand for this empathetic and insightful support is growing too. The Helpline Admiral Nurses took calls and emails from 14,155 people between April 2017 and March 2018. This is an increase of 27% on the same period in the previous year.

Susan Drayton, Clinical Lead of the Admiral Nurse Dementia Helpline, said:

“The Nurses on the Helpline do fantastic work, unpicking very complex situations and steering people towards solutions or signposting them to other services that they may not have known about. They need to be detectives and counsellors, as well as dementia nurses, and I know from the feedback that the support and advice they give people changes their lives.

“We have ambitious plans to expand the Helpline even further by another 50% over the next two years. Being nominated for the ‘Commitment to Carers Award’ by the RNCi is testament to how well regarded the Helpline is within the industry and the difference our Nurses make to family carers.”

If you have any questions or concerns about dementia, you can call the Admiral Nurse Dementia Helpline on 0800 888 6678 or email helpline@dementiauk.org. The Helpline opening hours are 9am-9pm on weekdays and 9am–5pm at weekends.