Further to our meeting with Julie Kalsi, from Crawley Borough Council, and our discussions on volunteering to help dementia patients in Residential Care Homes, we were invited to a free Interactive Information session to learn how dementia effects a person and what we could do to make a difference.   There are approximately 2.3 million Dementia Friends in the country and by 2020 it is hoped there will be 5 million.  Just listening and understanding about behaviour associated with dementia and learning more about the disease will only take an hour and is well worth finding out a bit more about it from your local Dementia Friends’ team.  Tonight, 12 of our COGS have become Dementia Friends.

The evening was extremely informative on how we can help dementia patients with their well-being.  For example, dementia patients will remember more about the emotions they felt with interacting with someone rather than the actual interaction.   There were some brilliant short films shown which also gave further understanding.

One was about a gentleman, Bill Corbett, who was in a Residential Home and it was realised that he actually used to play football for Celtic and Scotland.  Bill’s story is here:  http://vimeo.com/60324400

Also, extremely interesting, is the Bookcase Analogy, which advises how various situations affect a person with dementia.   Please watch this here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkvyGrOEIfA   Some of our COGS made the point that had they watched this or known about this in relation to their own relatives, it would have explained their emotions, more easily.

We will now be looking at getting some activity sessions ready, involving football, to visit local Care Homes and hopefully increase the well being of the patients.  Watch this space!