Dementia Friend

One of our Timebank members from Ernesettle asked for some help with understanding Dementia. Tammy who works for Age UK emailed us within a couple of days.

Tammy came along to the Ernesettle Social and started the conversation by asking what people thought Dementia was. Some answers were “it’s a brain injury” and “it’s about people losing their short-term memory”.

Tammy did an exercise where everyone matched the beginning and end of a sentence and Tammy then talked through each one. She also gave us a couple of facts like there are over 100 types of Dementia and Alzheimer’s is a type of Dementia, where all in the room thought Dementia was a type of Alzheimer’s! Tammy gave the analogy of a bookcase to your left which stores everything that you have done in the past and as a book falls off you lose that information. The bookcase on your right are all of your emotions that you have had from all of your activities and people who have Dementia don’t lose these as quickly. People will still understand how they feel about something longer than they will remember the piece of information.

At the end everyone was given a blue card with the 5 key messages on and were given their badge and informed that they were now classed as being a ‘Dementia Friend.’

People were then asked what they will pledge to do for Dementia. One of the members pledged to wear the badge and tell 5 people about the Dementia Friends initiative. From this conversation other Timebank members will be doing the ‘Dementia Friends’ training in October.

Val B said, ‘Thank you for getting Tammy here to talk to us about Dementia, it has really helped me.’

Graham said, ‘It has been interesting, and I didn’t think I would but I have learnt something today.’