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Editorial: Innovative Practice

Individual accounts of innovatory services are important in contributing to the evidence base for dementia care, but how can we ensure that lessons from their implementation are applied more widely? This is the underlying theme that links each of the articles included in this issue of Innovative Practice. In the early years of this century, practitioner researchers (for example, Coaten, 2002; Gottlieb-Tanaka, Small, & Yassi, 2003) began to highlight the benefits of creative expression for people with dementia. Now, important cultural institutions, such as Scottish Opera (McCabe, Greasley-Adams, & Goodson, 2013), have become involved in developing programmes that support people with dementia to continue to take part in, or try new ways of expressing themselves creatively. Unfortunately, funding for these initiatives is usually ad hoc and many of them become one-off events, rather than part of a sustained programme. In the first article, McParland, Cutler, and Innes (2017) describe a pilot movement and music project. While there was clear evidence that people with dementia taking part in the project enjoyed the activities and had some opportunities for social engagement and peer-to-peer support, the evaluation team found that many of the difficulties encountered during the pilot could have been resolved with more time for planning and preparation instead of being under pressure to spend the funding within a very short time frame or lose it. Appreciative Inquiry revolves around the seemingly simple idea of building upon strengths, starting from the assumption that – no matter how many difficulties beset an organisation – it will contain something that is working well and can be used as the basis for making positive changes (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). These principles have led to the use of Appreciative Inquiry in many complex and multi-factorial situations, ranging from the Signs of Safety approach to child protection (Baginsky, Moriarty, Manthorpe, Beecham, & Hickman, 2017) to strategies to reduce the misuse of prescription drugs among college students (Boyer, Droppa, Finneran, Smith, & Bernius, 2014). Given the widespread concerns about the quality of care received by people with dementia in hospital settings (Ashton & Manthorpe, 2017; de Vries, Drury-Ruddlesden, & Gaul, 2016), there is a clear rationale for testing Appreciative Inquiry in this setting. In the second article, Page, Rowett, and Davies-Abbott (2017) explain how Appreciative Inquiry was used to develop the Care