Editorial Assets-based approaches and dementia-friendly communities Shibley Rahman and Kate Swaffer Academic in Frailty and Dementia, England, UK Whilst it is possible that dementia-friendly communities simply evolve unilaterally due to various uncontrollable forces, a serious consideration, we feel, should be made to enquire whether dementia-friendly communities actually aim to promote the health of people with dementia and care partners. It is argued that an influence of the biomedical approach has been accompanied by an overly negative discourse, with a focus on symptoms, deficits and emotionally charged metaphors about dementia that have influenced the overall public perception (Zeilig, 2014). This focus may not be totally beneficial, however. In anaesthetics, ‘fixation errors’ occur when the practitioner concentrates solely upon a single aspect of a case to the detriment of other more relevant aspects (Fioratou, Flin, & Glavin, 2010). Fixation errors, indeed, are well recognised in anaesthetic practice and can contribute sig- nificantly to morbidity and mortality. With shifting the focus on how businesses might win more customers by being ‘dementia friendly’, securing a competitive advantage through ‘nudging’, other promising avenues of dementia-friendly communities, such as implementing rights enshrined within the UN Convention of Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD) and other Conventions, might not be given proper prominence. Even within the context of ‘communities working towards becoming dementia friendly,’ the definitions of ‘dementia-friendly’ and ‘community’ have remained somewhat diverse and even somewhat rather elusive, for example, the concept of ‘community’ may represent a place, the social and physical environments, an organisation, a group of individuals, a society, a culture or virtual communities (Lin, 2017). According to Handley, Bunn, and Goodman (2015), in order to make healthcare more ‘dementia-friendly’, a number of service areas need to be improved and kept at the same standard for any patient. These include diagnosis rates, access to care, treatment support and information, coordination of care, admission and readmission to hospital, admissions to care homes and post-diagnosis support. Corresponding author: Shibley Rahman, Academic in Frailty and Dementia, Primrose Hill, UK. Email: legalaware1213@gmail.com Dementia 2018, Vol. 17(2) 131–137 ! The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1471301217751533 journals.sagepub.com/home/dem