Check out our new online shop. This is something we’re trialing and I’m confident it will prove to be a succesful way to enable us to sell stock which is old-design, excess or slightly imperfect. Items we can’t sell at full price. What I also hope is that this will prove to be a great way for people to test-drive some of our products.

Although I’ve not heard great deal about his directly, I am of the understanding that very soon, individuals will be given their own budgets for care and related equipment and be able to spend this how they see fit. I’m also hearing a lot of consistent criticism of this scheme and it all seems quite obvious. Where is the benefit in distributing budget in this way? I guess the outcome is that lots of individuals will buy equipment which only they will use. Then what? This seems a very unworkable plan to me which will deliver much poorer value for money and fragment the delivery of care. I’d really like people to get this concept under their skin and make a lot of noise about it if it is as rediculous as it appears to be. I suspect the only winner may be ebay.

I’m pleased that the government has responded to the criticism of their success to date in delivering their dementia strategy. Clearly they have not admitted any short-comings directly, but thank goodness they’ve done something about it even so! Of course this is early days and I have not come across Alistair Burns before, (although we do have some connections with Manchester University – our own Dr Booth being an alumni) but I hope we see more activity than we have thus far. Maybe Gerry Robinson would have been a better choice? That’s probably unfair, but Gerry is a high-profile ‘mover and shaker’ who has proven skills and the passion to boot! There are probably lots of people we’d like to nominate……..but who wants to be in that particular hotseat and have to dance to the governments tune?

It’s exactly 2 years since the dementia signage designs became available to purchase. In that time we’ve gone from 0 to 1300 signs per month average (!) for the whole period!! Regarding memory boxes….frankly I’ve lost count.