Pioneering dementia care author brings vast knowledge to QCS
Jackie Pool joins QCS today from international care provider Sunrise Senior Living. 
As Dementia Care Champion, Jackie will play an integral role in helping QCS to create a progressive best practice dementia strategy for Health and Social Care Providers. Central to this vision will be the ground-breaking work that QCS and Jackie will do together. This will see QCS fully support Jackie to further advance her trailblazing PAL Instrument, which QCS has also acquired.
As a leading dementia specialist, Jackie, who is the creator of the Pool Activity Level (PAL) Instrument – a reliable and valid tool which assesses cognitive ability and profiles how to support the individual – has accrued nearly 40-years’ experience working in frontline dementia care.
Mat Whittingham QCS’s CEO and Co-Founder said “We’re delighted and honoured to welcome Jackie to the QCS team. Jackie is one of the UK’s leading experts in developing real-world strategies that can make a profound difference to people living with dementia. As the UK’s leading provider of care guidance and compliance content, our ambition is to help Jackie to take her research to new heights, and to use QCS’s extensive reach to make the PAL framework accessible to as many professionals as possible. This is another example of our goal to help care providers go beyond regulatory standards to provide the best possible care.”
Jackie added, “I’m incredibly excited to be joining QCS. Having dedicated all of my career to trying to improve the lives of those living with dementia, QCS has given me a once in a lifetime opportunity to further develop the PAL framework. With at least 70 percent of UK care home residents living with some form of dementia, or presenting with other cognitive difficulties, I believe that together we will help a greater number of care providers to deliver even more effective care and support to those who need it most. I’m looking forward to getting started.”
*Please also see some additional information about Jackie’s Pool Activity Level Instrument, below:
The PAL book has sold almost 5,000 copies so the book based version has at least that many core users but many will be sharing the Instrument with colleagues so probably a lot more. The PAL Instrument is translated into German, Danish, Spanish, Flemish, Lithuanian and Japanese. It is used globally and is as far afield as Australia and St Helena.
The digital PAL Instrument is licensed for use across 5 NHS Foundation Trusts in England and also to University College Hospital, Galway (HSE Trust). This means that it is being used across relevant hospital wards with hundreds of patients. It has mainly been supplied to single users in Care Homes and has probably been supplied to about 300 care homes. The PAL Instrument theory is taught to Occupational Therapists as a core assessment tool in many universities
