• Naaheed Mukadam, Amy Waugh, Claudia Cooper, and Gill Livingston.
• Division of Psychiatry, University College London, London, UK.
• BMJ Open. 2015 Sep 11; 5 (9): e007990.

ObjectivesPeople from Minority Ethnic groups tend to present late to dementia services, often in crisis. Culture-specific barriers to help-seeking seem to underlie this. We sought to determine these barriers to timely help-seeking for dementia among people from South Asian backgrounds and what the features of an intervention to overcome them would be.Study DesignQualitative study to delineate barriers to and facilitators of help-seeking for South Asian adults with dementia through focus groups and individual interviews.SettingCommunity settings in and around Greater London.ParticipantsTo achieve a maximum variation sample, we purposively recruited 53 English or Bengali speaking South Asian adults without a known diagnosis of dementia through community centres and snowballing.ResultsParticipants ranged in age from 18 to 83 years, were mostly female and were 60% Bangladeshi. We recruited people from different religions and occupational backgrounds and included those with experience of caring for someone with dementia as well as those without this experience. Participants identified four main barriers to timely diagnosis: barriers to help-seeking for memory problems; the threshold for seeking help for memory problems; ways to overcome barriers to help-seeking; what features an educational resource should have.ConclusionsWe have identified the features of an intervention with the potential to improve timely dementia diagnosis in South Asians. The next steps are to devise and test such an intervention.Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions.

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