ArticleDementia Care
Dementia Action Week 2026: The Numbers Your Roster Can't Ignore
Dementia Australia hasn't released this year's campaign theme yet, but the underlying figures driving Dementia Action Week haven't changed direction, they've just kept climbing. An estimated 446,500 Australians are living with dementia in 2026, and Dementia Australia projects that figure will more than double to over one million by 2065. It's already Australia's second leading cause of death, and among people in residential aged care, dementia is the norm rather than the exception: more than half of residents live with it.
Published 15 September 2026• 4 min read
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Dementia Action Week 2026: The Numbers Your Roster Can't Ignore
If you manage a facility or lead learning and development, that last statistic is the one worth sitting with. Dementia care isn't a specialty unit issue anymore. It's baseline competency for almost every role that touches direct care.
Dementia is a brain condition, not a stage of ageing
Dementia Australia has been consistent on this point across recent campaigns: dementia is a brain condition, not a normal part of ageing, and it's an umbrella term covering several different underlying conditions, of which Alzheimer's disease is the most common. That distinction matters practically. Staff who understand dementia as a set of distinct neurological conditions, each with different symptom patterns, progression and care implications, make different decisions at the bedside than staff who've absorbed it as vague background noise about "getting older."
Getting the framing right earlier also matters for the people living with it. Younger onset dementia, diagnosis before age 65, affected an estimated 29,200 Australians in 2024, a figure projected to rise to 42,000 by 2065, including people diagnosed in their 30s and 40s. Staff trained to expect dementia only in very old residents can miss or dismiss early symptoms in younger clients, delaying diagnosis and the post-diagnostic support that makes the biggest difference to quality of life.
Where training gaps actually show up
The gap between "we did dementia training" and "our staff can act on it" tends to show up in a few predictable places:
Behavioural and psychological symptoms. Responsive behaviours, such as agitation, resistance to care and wandering, are still too often read as the resident being "difficult" rather than as communication. Staff who understand these behaviours as an expression of unmet need, pain, fear or confusion respond very differently, and that difference shows up directly in incident rates and in family satisfaction.
Communication as people lose language. As dementia progresses, verbal communication becomes less reliable, but the person's capacity to sense tone, respect and dignity doesn't disappear at the same rate. Training that focuses only on early-stage communication leaves staff underprepared for mid- and late-stage care, where non-verbal connection becomes the primary channel.
Families and carers as part of the care team, not visitors. Over 1.6 million people in Australia are involved in the care of someone living with dementia. Family members often hold critical history, such as what a particular behaviour usually means, what's worked before, and what's changed recently. Staff who are trained to draw on that knowledge, rather than treat family as an interruption, get better clinical information and build more trust.
What the strengthened Standards expect
Under Standard 5 (Clinical Care) of the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, providers are expected to deliver care that's responsive to a person's changing clinical needs, including cognitive decline, and to have workers who are competent to do so, not just rostered to do so. For a resident population where dementia is now the majority experience rather than a minority one, that competency bar applies to most of your direct care workforce, not a designated dementia team.
That's a meaningful shift in how L&D leads should be thinking about coverage. If dementia-specific training sits in a single optional module somewhere in your library, it's worth asking whether that reflects the actual clinical reality of who your staff are caring for day to day.
Making Dementia Action Week count for more than a week
A few ways to use the week itself without treating it as the whole strategy:
- Run a baseline check. Ask a sample of direct care staff what they'd do in a specific responsive-behaviour scenario. The answers will tell you more about training gaps than a completion report will.
- Use the week to launch, not just commemorate. If you've been meaning to refresh dementia content against the current evidence base, September is a natural trigger point with organisational attention already on the topic.
- Loop in families. Dementia Action Week resources from Dementia Australia are designed for public use. Sharing them with residents' families reinforces the same understanding your staff are working from, and reduces the gap between what families expect and what care actually looks like day to day.
- Don't skip the National Dementia Helpline. Wherever you're publishing content about dementia this week, include the National Dementia Helpline, 1800 100 500, for anyone who reads it and has questions or concerns of their own.
Altura Learning's dementia care courses are built to reflect current clinical evidence and the expectations of Standard 5 under the strengthened Quality Standards. If it's been a while since your library was reviewed against the current standards, Dementia Action Week is as good a prompt as any to check.
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