Wicking Centre co-director Andrew Robinson said establishing a strong link between the aged-care sector and dementia education would improve the care received in residential facilities. 

The Wicking Centre presented evidence to a Senate committee at an inquiry hearing in Launceston on Monday. The inquiry is examining the future of Australia’s aged-care sector workforce. 

"We need to address dementia literacy, and we need to utilise these strategies, interventions that we've developed … that have really been proven to be effective," Professor Robinson said. 

The Wicking Centre is part of the University of Tasmania’s Faculty of Health. Its Understanding Dementia Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has been successful globally. 

Professor Robinson said the course could become an educational entry point for dementia education and a dementia literacy “intervention”. 

"This needs to be something the government gets on board with us, to help us deliver the MOOC to much greater numbers of people as a policy objective," Professor Robinson said. 

Professor Robinson said establishing aged “centres of excellence” for aged care, similar to co-located clinical schools at hospitals for medical students, would aid dementia education. 

Professor Robinson was the senior and corresponding author of the Who Knows, Who Cares? Dementia knowledge among nurses, care workers, and family members of people living with dementia paper, published in 2014.

It found about 60 per cent of family carers of someone with dementia and 50 per cent of aged-care staff surveyed lacked understanding that dementia was a terminal illness. 

“In Australia and elsewhere, issues related to recruitment and retention in this sector are endemic ... which means that the possibility of many aged care staff working long enough to accumulate better dementia knowledge is diminished,” the study said. 

Professor Robinson said organisations could accommodate workers’ increased dementia awareness. 

"We can't have have short term, reactionary policy,” Professor Robinson said.

“We've got to have a programmatic approach to building capability in the sector so that all those people ... come in and work with far greater dementia literacy, which means that [aged-care workers] can do a much better job,” he said.