To meet growing need now and in the future for high-quality dementia care for all, we must address inequalities in health and social care for people needing support with care and their families (including close friends). People with dementia want to live a meaningful life as far as possible; engaging in personally valued, purposeful activities that support connectedness to self, others and the environment. Some groups remain underserved. People from ethnically diverse groups, in poorer areas, rural areas, with multiple conditions and severe dementia too often struggle to access the appropriate care needed. This causes considerable distress to them and their families, and their quality of life. What we will achieve: The EMPOWER Dementia Network creates an innovative and much needed collaboration between dementia care, social care, primary care and palliative care, with community partners and people with lived experience. Together we identify priority areas for change, develop inclusive research practices, and build research capacity in co-production and community approaches. Working with policy makers, practitioners, and the public we will identify and construct system-based solutions to lever a step-change in societal attitudes on living and dying with dementia, and in health and social care policies to address inequalities in high-quality care for people with dementia and complex needs. Our aim: Working in partnership, we will co-create a network for excellence to support and EMPOWER equalities for people needing support with care, and their families. The Network will pioneer novel evidence-based community and co-production approaches to lever change in dementia care, focussing on people with complex needs from marginalised, vulnerable, and underserved groups. We will advance research methods to ensure meaningful engagement for people with dementia, for their voice to be heard to shape research priorities and generate understanding and thinking on the solutions to provide high-quality health and social care for all needing greater support. Intended benefits: The EMPOWER Dementia Network focuses on 'mind and body' research putting the person before the disease to address inequalities in dementia care for people with complex needs, and their families. We use co-production as the guiding approach to work together, for community partners and people with lived experience to drive the Network priorities and innovations in inclusive research approaches. We achieve this by: Creating a shared platform to connect dementia communities, people with lived experience, practitioners, policy makers and researchers to work together to bring their ideas to life and lever change for equality in dementia care to maintain and promote quality of life for people with dementia, and their families. Identifying and implementing approaches to build trusting partnerships, focusing on outreach and engagement with groups underrepresented in dementia research that seek to benefit, particularly people underserved from ethnically diverse groups, socio-economic disadvantage, with multiple conditions and severe dementia. Promoting equality of opportunity for inclusion in research by innovating inclusive research approaches to diversify involvement and participation in research, particularly for people with increasingly complex needs and severe dementia, too often unrepresented in health and social care research. Constructing and pursuing the best system-based solutions for high-quality dementia care in collaborative small projects connecting community partners, people with lived experiences and researchers to tackle inequalities in care through understanding experiences, identifying solutions and engaging policy makers and the public to lever and sustain change.

The 'oldest old' are the fastest growing age group in the UK and a grand societal challenge we face is that the nature of growing older and end of life is changing. There are distinct challenges that are pushing some existing systems to breaking point (e.g. there is an increasing demand for care, but there are reductions in resources available to support the older old and worryingly a reduction in people using local authority care services which is suggestive of exclusion). We position this research within the fourth age; a period of life clinically characterised by physical and cognitive frailty and decline towards death. People in this period of life are seldom included in research, but have a unique voice around critical societal challenges and could be sensitively and meaningfully included into research in order to give them a voice in the reimagining of digital media to support sense of self for the older old. Further this research will engage with carers and those bereaved to investigate how new media could support people's relationships and sense of self not only at end of life but also in bereavement. We are living in a new digital age, each gathering a digital trail of media and personal data as we live: photographs, videos, blog posts, forum comments, Facebook conversations, tweets, music preferences etc. Whether these are created by us or by others about us there is a vast and rich wealth of digital media that could be leveraged and reappropriated to reflect positive things back to us in new ways - about ourselves and our connectedness with others. The concept of ongoingness is something we see as valuable for the development of new tools and systems for the configuration of metadata in new ways. Ongoingness suggests that all stages of our lives are connected and continuing, which gives us ways to think about what digital media creation and consumption practices could be that draw on the repository of media connected to us in challenging contexts. It also gives us the ability to consider how digital technologies could be developed in acknowledgement that people need to maintain a form of connectedness to a dead loved one in bereavement. Beyond memorialisation people benefit from practices that nurture an ongoing (albeit different) relationship with the deceased after a loved one has died. To date there is a lack of research considering technology for these contexts and what we can't do currently is curate this vast resource of media to specifically support sense of self, help people deal with their own approaching end of life, nor help others deal with bereavement of a loved one through using these digital assets in purposeful ways. Through links via our partners from Alzheimer's Society, Cruse, NCPC, HospiceUK, Dementia Positive, Marie Curie and Dementia Care we will work with older old people, carers and the bereaved using a research through design methodology to gently use acts of making and reflecting through objects to firstly develop new ways of using our metadata, secondly develop and deploy Internet of Things high fidelity prototypes that enable creation and curation of this digital media in new ways and thirdly develop new visions of consumption that foreground ongoingness. To give an example of what this could mean in the context of anticipating death - through their lives Betty and Derrick always used to jokingly argue with each other as to which song was better The Beatles 'Blackbird' or 'Dear Prudence'. Derrick curates their media so that after his death when Betty selects 'Blackbird', the song 'Dear Prudence' will always be played straight afterwards because he knows that it will make Betty smile. The couple loved gardening, now every May Betty unfolds her e-paper and a compilation of podcasts featuring specific flowers from the current year's Chelsea Flower Show are sent to Betty and a matching bouquet is delivered to her with anecdotes from Derrick's blog of how he grew some of these plants.