If we don’t ask, we don’t know: empowering people with dementia and carers to shape medicine choices
| Saturday, May 30, 2026 |
| 4:40 PM - 5:00 PM |
| Royal Benowa Ballroom |
Overview
Dr Nagham Ailabouni Freeman
Details
According to the World Health Organisation, there are nearly 10 million new cases of dementia every year. People living with dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) commonly experience multimorbidity and polypharmacy, yet few resources exist to support them and their carers to participate in medicines’ decision-making. As memory and communication challenges progress, medicines may become misaligned with goals of care creating valuable opportunities for medicine review and optimisation of medicines. However, shared decision-making remains limited due to limited consumer (person with dementia or carer) self-efficacy, carer burden, clinical complexity, and system constraints.
In partnership with consumers, carers, healthcare professionals, and international collaborators, we co-designed the PRIME tool. This conversation-starter tool is designed to improve self-efficacy, prompt medicines review, and support alignment between goals of care and treatment.
This session will provide practical approaches, resources, and a case vignette to demonstrate conducting a comprehensive medicine review for a person living with dementia and carer. We will discuss using resources such as the PRIME tool and consider a practical clinical workflow approach to nudge a powerful conversation that will result in improved medicine use. This in turn may help align the medicine list with the person’s current health priorities, reducing their risk of experiencing medicine-related harm and improving their overall health and wellbeing.
Learning objectives:
• Identify person, prescriber, and system-level barriers that limit effective shared decision-making about medicines for people living with dementia and their carers.
• Discuss a person-centred approach to engage people living with dementia and their carers in medication review and optimisation according to their individual health priorities
• Discuss practical strategies to enhance consumer self-efficacy and reduce communication barriers in medicine-related decision-making
Competency Standards (2016); 1.6, 2.1, 3.1, 3.3, 3.5, 3.6
Speaker
Dr Nagham Ailabouni
Senior Lecturer and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow
The University of Queensland
If we don't ask, we don't know: Empowering people with dementia and carers to shape medicine choices
Biography
Dr Nagham Ailabouni is a clinician-researcher and a NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the University of Queensland, The School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences. Dr Ailabouni's main research interests include implementation science, co-design and consumer engagement in person-centred deprescribing, quality use of medicines in older people, people living with dementia and their carers. Dr Ailabouni’s PhD (University of Otago) focused on deprescribing anticholinergic medicines and sedatives in older people in aged care, encouraging the funding of subsidised medicine reviews in New Zealand.
Dr Ailabouni is a named investigator on ~$10,470,288 (CIA: $750,000) of grant/fellowship funding evidencing her leadership in her field of optimizing medicine use for older people and people living with dementia.
Dr Ailabouni is a proud pharmacist who has practiced in various clinical settings. She is an engaged member of various Pharmacy Societies and has served as a nominated member of the QLD Pharmaceutical Society of Australia Branch Committee (2025-26) and was elected President of the South Canterbury and Otago Pharmaceutical Society of New Zealand Branch Committees (2014-18).
