Fall 2026 graduating student Sevinder Kaur reflects on the importance of dementia education

Why is dementia education important for social workers? Master of Social Work student, Sevinder Kaur, who will graduate in Fall 2026, had the opportunity to reflect on this question as a participant in a summer course taught in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam by University of Toronto professors Franco Taverna from Human Biology and Raza Mirza from the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work’s Institute for Life Course and Aging. As a Registered Social Worker and Social Service Worker, Kaur came to FIFSW’s Advanced Standing program with a deep interest in aging and dementia care, caregiver support, and person-centred approaches that promote autonomy, relationships, and quality of life.

With experience supporting diverse populations, primarily older adults, across long-term care and community settings, Kaur says that at the heart of her work and learning is a simple question: How can we help people not only receive care, but continue to live well? Kaur shares her reflections in the essay below.

Seeing the person, questioning the practice: Dementia Education in Social Work

By Sevinder Kaur, RSW, RSSW 

Across nearly every role I have held as a social worker, I have found myself returning to dementia. Across long-term care, community, and caregiver support settings, dementia was not always written into my job title, but it was consistently present in the lives of the people I served.

Over time, I began to realize that some of the hardest questions I encountered were not questions a referral or care plan could easily answer.

What happens when keeping someone safe begins to restrict the life that gives them meaning? How do we preserve a person’s identity when their diagnosis increasingly becomes how others understand them? How do we support a spouse who is simultaneously a partner, caregiver, advocate, and someone experiencing their own grief? And when a person can no longer advocate in the ways they once could, who ensures that their relationships, routines, preferences, and history remain part of the decisions being made about them?

These are deeply social work questions.

My experience in long-term care has made this particularly visible. I have seen how a change in cognition or behaviour can alter where someone lives, how independently they move through their environment, and sometimes even whether they remain close to the people most important to them. I have also seen residents who may no longer remember the details of a conversation but still respond to a familiar voice, a meaningful activity, humour, music, or simply someone taking the time to sit beside them. Those moments have continually reminded me that dementia may change how a person experiences and communicates with the world, but it does not erase their need for connection, dignity, identity, or belonging.

The same is true for families. Through my work within the field, I have learned that dementia is rarely an individual experience. It enters an entire family system. Roles change. Relationships change. Families become navigators of healthcare, community services, finances, long-term care and decision-making, often while trying to emotionally understand what is happening themselves. Social workers frequently meet families somewhere in the middle of all of this.

This is why I believe specialized dementia education matters.

Practice has taught me how to support transitions, connect people with resources, facilitate difficult conversations, advocate within systems, and help families through moments of uncertainty. Specialized education has given me the opportunity to step outside the immediacy of those situations and critically examine the assumptions, structures, and philosophies shaping the care we provide.

The course Living with Dementia: Innovations in Care and the Determinants of Well-being approached dementia not only through cognition and disease, but through social connection, caregiving, environment, policy, autonomy, and quality of life. Experiencing Dutch models of dementia care made these ideas especially powerful. At De Hogeweyk and green care farms, concepts I had encountered throughout my practice- personhood, autonomy, meaningful engagement and risk; became something I could see and question differently. The course intentionally challenged conventional institutional approaches that can prioritize efficiency and risk mitigation, asking instead what care can look like when continuity, choice, autonomy and meaningful living are placed at the centre.

I returned to my own practice thinking differently. Not because everything I observed abroad could or should simply be replicated in Canada, but because seeing another way of doing things made practices I had once accepted as routine feel worthy of questioning.

That, to me, is one of the greatest values of dementia education for social workers.

As dementia increasingly intersects with social work across long-term care, hospitals, community services, mental health, housing, palliative care and policy, Social workers will encounter dementia in many forms and settings. We need to be prepared not only to ask, “How do we care for someone living with dementia?” but also, “How do we help someone continue to live- not simply be cared for- with dementia?”

For me, that distinction captures why continued learning in dementia care is so important. Practice often teaches us what to do, while specialized education challenges us to ask why we do it.

Sevinder Kaur holds a Bachelor of Social Work from Toronto Metropolitan University and will receive her Master of Social Work from University of Toronto in Fall 2026. During her Master of Social Work, Kaur pursued the Mental Health & Health field of study alongside the Collaborative Specialization in Aging, Palliative and Supportive Care across the Life Course.