ADAPT: Animating Dementia Prevention

Background: Dementia is the second leading cause of death for Australians, with symptoms that place considerable burdens on individuals, their families, and health and aged care services. However, dementia is not an inevitable consequence of ageing. There is now strong evidence that up to 40% of dementia can be prevented by addressing health and lifestyle factors such as promoting physical activity, healthy diet, and social connectedness.

Community need: Unfortunately, the dementia prevention message has still not reached ethnically communities, where there is generally limited awareness of dementia and dementia prevention. Thus, there is a need for health promotion strategies that address this gap that can improve awareness among ethnically diverse populations and better support culturally relevant dementia prevention efforts.

Approach: Using a co-design approach and extensive stakeholder engagement, in this project we scripted, produced, and disseminated an online animated video about dementia prevention in 9 languages which reflect Australia’s emerging and established CALD groups - Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindi, Tamil, Greek, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Italian. The animations were made freely available online.