What is Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST)?

CST is an evidence-based group treatment for people with mild to moderate dementia. It involves 14 or more sessions of stimulating, themed activities, based around more complex principles including learning theory and person-centred care. CST can be extended into a longer-term treatment and can be offered to a range of clients including outpatients and people in residential or day care.

What does the training involve?

Training is led by a Clinical Psychologists with extensive experience in offering CST. Training is interactive, involving group exercises, role-play and video observation as well as some ‘teaching'.

Who is the training suitable for?

The course is suitable for healthcare professionals including psychologists, occupational therapists and nurses as well as community-based organisations running meeting centres and day opportunities, health care assistants and managers within health and social care.

Course Aim:

To give learners an overview of how to deliver Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST). CST is a brief evidence-based group treatment for people with dementia. This interactive course will include a background about CST and how it can be used, research overview and detailed presentation of the treatment, including video footage and role-play.

Learning Objectives - at the end of the training delegates will be able to:

• Reflect on some different perspectives of dementia
• Consider key psychosocial approaches for dementia
• Learn about how CST was designed and evaluated
• Be familiar with the 14 CST sessions, through session clips and role-play
• Understand how to apply the key principles to CST
• Develop a plan for running CST groups, which considers issues around implementation.

Training facilitator: Dr Helen Donovan

Helen qualified in 1994 in Australia as a clinical  psychologist, and has  worked in older people’s mental health in both  Australia and the UK for  more than fifteen years. She has been the psychology lead for older  people in Bedfordshire mental health services  since 2003. She became involved with Cognitive Stimulation Therapy in  2006 after Aimee Spector  joined the Trust, and has been involved in CST  groups, supervision,  training and research since that time. She was  part of the SHIELD  research team, with Bedfordshire as one of the sites  in the randomised  controlled trial of Maintenance Cognitive  Stimulation Therapy. She has  provided many CST training workshops and  conference presentations in the  UK and Australia.