Intergenerational community

Belong Chester offers dementia care with a distinct difference, in that it is part of an intergenerational community in which there is a 25-place nursery alongside independent living apartments, day care and 24 hour support “households”. “There’s a real sense of community in Belong villages and the impact of the Chester nursery is just incredible,”…

Wishing Washing Line

Alive is a Bristol-based charity working creatively in care settings to develop person-centred activities and CEO Isobel Jones described the Wishing Washing Line project as an example. “It supports older people to fulfil their dreams, big or small,” she told UKDC.  “The dream of one 104-year-old lady was to be arrested, so we arranged for…

Prescribing non-pharmacological interventions

The power of non-pharmacological interventions to improve wellbeing was illustrated by a project to find out the causes of distressed behaviours and respond accordingly.  Clinical psychologist Joanna Marshall and OT Susannah Thwaites spoke about their project to prescribe music, robotic pets and sensory items instead of anti-psychotic medications. Marshall and Thwaites are part of the…

Work with local communities

Former Department of Health (DH) civil servant Ruth Eley – now chair of the carer involvement group tide (Together in Dementia Everyday) – gave short shrift to the government’s proposed Major Conditions Strategy (MCS), a combined strategy for dementia and five other conditions including cancer and heart disease. While at the DH Eley had a…

Reconsidering Dementia books launched

Open University Press’s “Reconsidering Dementia” series continues to grow with four new books in the pipeline to add to the five books already published.  Books forthcoming next year include Talking with Dementia Reconsidered, by Keith Oliver, Reinhard Guss and Ruth Bartlett, Living with Dementia Reconsidered (IDEAL Project), edited by Linda Clare and colleagues, and Reconsidering…

Research priorities

Research programmes have tended to focus on finding a disease-modifying treatment for Alzheimer’s, but how can we channel more funding into research to improve care and quality of life? Susan Mitchell, head of policy at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said her charity was committed to finding more treatments but that it was important to avoid “unintended…