Following the 2022 SDRC Executive Committee election, Dr Leah Macaden has been elected as a new member. Find out more in Leah’s biography below.

Dr Leah Macaden is a Senior Lecturer in Nursing at the University of Edinburgh with a rich and diverse range of academic, clinical, management and research expertise in India and the UK for over 30 years. Over the past decade, she has harnessed technology, innovation and developed a community of dementia practice to co design educational resources and research in key areas of Gerontological Nursing: Dementia; Dignity, Technology Enabled Dementia Care / Education and Sensory impairments.

She developed the first comprehensive pre-registration dementia curriculum [Being Dementia Smart at the University of Stirling (BDS, 2014) and a blended approach to Dementia Enhanced Education to Promote Excellence (DEEPE, 2017)] at UHI underpinned by Scottish policy and aligned to the national framework for dementia workforce development. Over 1400 nursing graduates have been trained with dementia care competencies with both these initiatives five years ahead of this being mandated by the Nursing & Midwifery Council, [NMC] UK in 2019.

Dr Macaden’s recent work also includes working with experts in Human Rights Law to develop DigniSpace –the first online resource for self-directed learning, co-produced with students, research informed and underpinned by the Scottish PANEL principles of Human Rights, that will enable students, health and social care practitioners to understand the complexities of Dignity using the Human Rights lens.

National / international recognition for her innovative approaches, leadership and research in dementia education for workforce development include the following awards: Churchill Fellow [2019] and National Teaching Fellow [202]. She was recently inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. Dr Macaden was one of 250 nurse leaders from around the world and the only nurse academic from Scotland to be awarded this prestigious award this year.

As a Churchill Fellow, Dr Macaden secured the COVID 19 Action Fund to develop the first comprehensive dementia education resource for blended learning for care homes which will become part of the COVID 19 Knowledge Bank in the UK. This resource has been widely disseminated with nurse academics in USA, India, Norway, and South Korea.

Dr Macaden is committed to support and advance the SDRC’s theme on Living well with Dementia through high quality research, active international engagement and mentoring of early career researchers. As a keen investor in building future capacity for dementia research through research mentoring, she has secured three externally funded PhD studentships competitively since 2016.

We would like to thank Leah joining us.

You can view and find out more about the entire SDRC Executive Committee members here

The SDRC Executive Committee are elected from SDRC membership annually. If you would like to know more about when these elections are, become an SDRC member