find Dementia Signage Blog - Design For Dementia

I can’t believe I’m the only person to have noticed this but…..

In the last couple of years as the drive to improve dementia care has really started to gather pace and prominence, it has struck me as odd that people are independently re-doing the same work and processes over and over again.

For example; The English government commissioned a public consultation and subsequently published a dementia strategy for England. Scotland did the same thing. So did Wales. Why? Why didn’t they work together? Do people in Scotland have different needs from those in Wales? Am I missing something?

Now I’m noting the same duplication on a local government level where one local authority will elect its ‘captains’ and send them for training so they can develop their strategies at local level. And a great thing it is too! But can’t these ‘champions’ be given the facilities to spread their knowledge and experiences to a wider audience? I know they want to.

Am I just too naive because I think it would make a whole heap of sense for people to communicate more?

I would like to see the brilliant people who are achieving so much in the field of #dementia care talking to each other more. Sharing their experiences and collaborating.

Such an initiative will save a lot of money on training and paperwork and goodness knows what else and the end result will inevitably be superior and more consistent as the regions share their successes and their mistakes so they are not repeated around the country.

Paradoxically, as is often the case, we seem to have more activity going on in the farther reaches of the UK than we do on our own doorstep. But that’s all changing it seems, with a fantastic project to build #Extracare homes in North Yorkshire.

I recently attended the launch of North Yorkshire County Councils initiative to create a ‘collective’ of working partnerships enabling the best people in the field to collaborate in creating 30 new homes across the North Yorkshire region over the next 5 years.

Naturally, I was delighted to see that ‘Find’ products were specified in their presentation as examples of good practice where #dementia is going to be catered for, and I’m looking forward to being involved in the partnerships as they develop.

It’s a great drive and so wonderful that they can fund this initiative in these difficult times. Furthermore, I believe this is the first such project to be undertaken by a local authority in the UK although I think one or two others are in the pipeline in other parts of the country.

http://www.find-caresystems.de/ is now live and doing business in Germany. Our first orders will be despatched this week and we look forward to feedback from our new German clients.

The ebay exercise has not been as lively as I expected but has generated our first order from Australia. How fab is that! I’m really pleased. Tiny though the order is, the words ‘acorn’ and ‘mighty Oak’ are echoing around my rattley brain http://stores.ebay.co.uk/find-Stock-Clearance-Store

I saw this today http://new.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/article/default.aspx?objid=69866 and I just can’t help but notice what a fundamentally contradictory thing it is that cutting edge technologies help people whom I hope I may inoffensively describe as ‘past the point of advancement’.

In our role as a solutions developer for people with dementia, and in creating an appropriate environment to live in. Take our #reminiscence image library for example we look back into our past and to a technologically more simple era. Yet here we are with telecare, social media, electronic tracking and many other technology-based approches being used to maintain and improve life for people with dementia.

At the CareFair & Congress in Nuremberg, our first exposure in Germany, find signage obtained a lot of attention and appreciation from the professional world. find products will soon be added to the technical list of the German National Alzheimer´s Association. Stefanie Kook