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 Gemma Ridel

Gemma is a clinical psychologist currently working with people with dementia  in Norfolk. She also lectures on the University of East Anglia Clinical  Psychology Doctoral Programme. She has extensive experience of teaching,  supervising and running CST groups. She was involved with the  Individual Cognitive Stimulation Therapy trial, as Norfolk was one of  the sites in the randomised controlled trial. She has provided many CST  training workshops and conference presentations in the UK and Ireland.