Professor June Andrews is the Director of the Dementia Services Development Centre at the University of Stirling in Scotland (www.dementia.stir.ac.uk). Her previous post was Director of the Centre for Change and Innovation in the Scottish Government where she was a Senior Civil Servant. The Dementia Services Development Centre (DSDC) at the University of Stirling works with health and social care services across the UK and throughout the world to improve care for people with dementia and support for their families. It does this through research and teaching and translating knowledge into practical tools many of which are available through the website.
The DSDC and its website are supported by the Dementia Services Development Trust a small charity that set up the DSDC exactly twenty-five years ago. The areas of interest include design of buildings that reduce symptoms, training, artistic expression and framing of dementia, supporting dementia friendly community initiatives, improving education of qualified and unqualified carers and care workers, and provision of distance learning postgraduate qualifications in dementia studies.
Professor Andrews is a graduate of the University of Glasgow where she studied philosophy and English literature before beginning her nurse education and studying at the University of Nottingham. In recent years her work has been recognized by the Chief Nurses of the Four UK countries with a Lifetime Achievement Award (2012) and the Nursing Standard awarded her the Robert Tiffany prize in 2011 for international work. The British American Project of which she is a Fellow awarded her their first and only Founder’s award for service. In 2014 she was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal College of Nursing of the UK, the highest honour that they can bestow.
She was listed in the Health Service Journal as one of the two dementia clinicians in the UK in the top 100 influential clinicians in 2013. Earlier as Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing she led an association of 35,000 nurses negotiating pay and conditions and representing their interests in the media and at with the Scottish Government. Professor Andrews is a psychiatric and general nursing qualified nurse with over thirty years experience. Most of her clinical nursing work was with older people with mental health problems.
