By Jackie Pool, QCS, Dementia Care Champion This article, the second in a series of four, looks at how carers and activity providers can achieve and maintain a sense of wellbeing for individuals living with moderate to severe dementia. The focus is centred on how to support a person at the Sensory level as defined...
What is the potential for more research in care homes and the experience of residents living with dementia? In the second of a series of articles on the CHARM care home research model, Isabelle Latham and colleagues evaluate its impact. We have already described CHARM – the Care Home Action Researcher-in-residence Model...
Courses for family carers can help them prepare for the future, build their resilience and equip them for their caring role. Jennifer Bray, Teresa Atkinson and Tracey Williamson evaluated a a unique 3-day residential course focusing on family carers of people living with dementia. Caring for people living with dementia can be demanding and the...
Skills that dementia care staff bring to their roles are often poorly understood even though they can have an enormous impact on people’s wellbeing. Katherine Ludwin and colleagues describe a study in which they are capturing everyday interactions on video with a view to identifying specific skills for training purposes. It is well established that...
Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks once said that “it is our brain that gives us our experience of the world,” so it follows that, if something is changing our brain, it will change how we see and experience the world. Therefore, it is important to understand how the brain functions and how it impacts behavioural expressions of...
When the pandemic broke out, people with dementia were frequently isolated and left without services on which they had depended. Care Visions Healthy Ageing and Alzheimer Scotland came up with a solution in the form of online therapeutic activities, as Zara Quail and colleagues explain. When the pandemic struck, many people were required to...
Numbers of people with young onset dementia have been severely underestimated and prevalence is likely to be much higher than previously thought. Janet Carter and colleagues report on the findings of their study, which has significant implications for service provision. There are no routinely published statistics of the current number of people with a diagnosis...
Living through two years of Covid has been grim for us all; for people with dementia, and for those who love and care for them, the pandemic has been brutal, terrifying and bewildering. Stepping back from the frontline, however, we can see how the challenges thrown up by the lockdowns sparked certain innovations – often...
Sandie Woods gives a snapshot of the Alzheimer’s Show, which took place on 25-26 March in London, focusing on learning, sharing and experiencing what it means to live with dementia. People living with dementia and professionals came together at the Alzheimer’s Show to discuss new developments in dementia research, best practice and practical approaches to...
“Has life in the community returned to normal for you now that the Covid restrictions have been lifted or do things still feel unsafe?” I am living with vascular dementia, Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia and I was shielding during lockdown. It’s been a while now since all the restrictions were lifted. I know...