Frederick Graham

Over my 26-year nursing career, I have been driven to help patients with dementia and delirium feel safe, understood and valued. Witnessing how the provision of relational, biopsychosocial dementia and delirium care alleviates patient distress brings me deep satisfaction and hope. I also have a fierce determination to change the systems that make this kind of care difficult to deliver in hospitals.

My journey from jazz violinist to hospital nurse began in my 30s when I retrained as a nurse at QUT and began work on a medical ward at the Princess Alexandra Hospital. I was confronted firsthand by the challenges of caring for older people with dementia and delirium within a hospital environment poorly designed to meet their needs. I saw how this compromised quality and safety, contributed to distress and behaviours such as agitation and aggression, and placed patients and staff at risk. The inequity experienced by cognitively impaired older people, and the staff who care for them, instilled in me a deep sense of injustice that fuelled my commitment to system change and ultimately led me to undertake doctoral studies in acute care of cognitively impaired patients. This commitment shaped a career in leading and researching initiatives that span hospital-wide dementia services, specialised units and models of care, pain assessment tools, national education programs, clinical practice guidelines and delirium research priorities.

I am now the nursing lead of a Queensland Health statewide project that is responding to deaths from patient-to-patient assaults. We have codesigned a hospital-wide, infrastructure-enabled model of care to improve safety and quality for patients and staff. Through my Churchill Fellowship, I aim to strengthen this model by bringing back world-leading approaches to workforce capacity-building, practices and training, to create hospitals where people living with dementia and delirium can receive safe, compassionate and high-quality care.