find Dementia Signage Blog - Design For Dementia

Last week we attended our first dementia conference in Nuremberg and recieved a very warm response indeed! Our brilliant partner (Stefanie Kook) who is based in Leverkusen, effectively launched Find-Germany single handedly (due to flight restrictions) and evidently did a great job. Watch out for the German blogs

The progression of Find in Germany is following a similar pattern to the British launch so all indicators are that this should prove equally successful in the German environment. It is a big landmark for Find to prove our products work just as effectively in other countries and cultures and this is a significcant step towards that.

Our 6 month project to formally study the influence of our products in a dementia care home environment has been completed. I’m now assessing the results prior to publishing.
I’ll welcome direct contact from anyone with a specific interest in this is.

I must do my bit to publicise two great books. Both quite different from each other.

“Rework” written by the founders of software company 37 signals. It’s different! http://37signals.com/rework/

Secondly, one of my absolute favourite books and the only one I’ve ever read 3 times – The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff. If this doesn’t improve your outlook on life, nothing will!

However, if you are of the minority who dislike philosophical bears with small, pink, omnivorous side-kicks, you may want to give this one a miss.

What on earth are the mysterious forces which influence the ups and downs of business. We were flying in March!! Then the whole world disappeared in the first half of April and I genuinely rang my own numbers from my mobile phone at one point to ensure they were still on. Then this week. Bang! It’s all hands to the pump again!!
I’ve been in business for 16 years and I’ll never figure it out…..perhaps I should stop trying.

Let’s get this bit out of the way first: Jeremy is a really nice bloke…..never thought I’d say that in public about an MP.

In his role as the chair of the all party parliamentary group on dementia, he’s also got such an important role to play in the drive to improve dementia care.
I hope our recent discussions bare fruit and we get the opportunity to contribute our knowledge on the built environment.

The groups previous report on training and dementia care is a plain speaking, clear report which I hope is proving its worth.
A further report focussing on the relationship between the environment and dementia should serve to push more people to re-look at where people with dementia live, and how it affects their well being.
As the issues become more pressing, it’s important to understand that a well designed environment is also ‘good business’ and investment now will save colossal amounts of money in the future.

I had the very good fortune to meet Jeremy Wright MP yesterday for a discussion relating to the APPG (all party parliamentary group) on Dementia.

I’ll write more presently but apparently there is a APPG on just about anything you can imagine, even table-tennis! But until he noticed it, (in 2007) there was no such APPG for Dementia. How astoundingly shocking is that! Perhaps that’s an indication of how much work there is to be done?

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.