May madness

It feels like I say this quite often, but as the Association for Dementia Studies is doing a lot at the moment, we thought it would be useful to take stock and draw breath in this week’s blog. Here’s an overview of what’s going on.

Education and training

Our PGCert students have recently submitted their final assignments so our lecturers are busy marking. Before we know it, we’ll be welcoming a new cohort of students on our September modules! If you would like to be one of them, please have a look at our website or watch our new short video. A reminder to current and former students – you are eligible for the Hennell Award so why not apply!?

The next cohort of the 5-week Meeting Centre online training starts later this month, and this time is being facilitated by Kirrie Connections. If this is too short notice, don’t worry, we’ll be running another cohort in July. Have a look at our website for full details and how to register for either course. We’re also working on developing Meeting Centre training for other audiences, so keep an eye open for further updates.

Conferences and events

In Dementia Action Week we’ve got information stands at the Leominster Dementia Conference and The Worcester Dementia Action Alliance Awareness Event (both on 16^th May), as well as running a dementia awareness and information session for staff here at the University of Worcester on 17^th May supported by having a stand in the St John’s campus reception area.

We’ll also be at the Alzheimer’s Society Annual Conference in London on 18^th May, presenting at the Cornwall Dementia Conference down in Newquay on 19^th May and presenting at the 23rd International Conference on Integrated Care in Belgium later in the month. Busy times!

We’re also planning our Get Real event to launch and share the findings. Although it’s not until 12^th July, our plans are well underway, and if you would like to attend you can register here. As part of the event we’ll also be displaying our Meeting Centres family blanket so don’t forget to send in your squares!

Link to Meeting Centre Blanket flyer

If that wasn’t enough, we’ll be writing abstracts to submit to various conferences such as UK Dementia Congress later in the year to share findings from a whole host of our research projects.

Research and consultancy

We’ve got several research projects underway at various stages, so we’ll be working on these as well as writing articles for recently completed projects. Bid writing is also taking place with several bids taking shape quite nicely (fingers crossed!).

A work in progress is the development of an app version of the environmental assessment tools. The app is not quite at the point of being made available, but it’s not far away – watch this space.

We’re also working on a series of short videos relating to Meeting Centre data collection, both to help Meeting Centre staff understand what’s involved but also to help explain it to members and carers and encourage them to get involved. It’s another ‘coming soon’ situation, but hopefully the videos will be helpful to everyone.

Phew! Same again next month?

Focusing on the little things

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up with trying to make big changes or getting things happening at scale, but that means the little things can get overlooked. In this blog we’re going to celebrate a few small tweaks and changes that have happened recently, which have probably gone unnoticed so far!

• Updating our publications page – on our website we have a page where we share lists of our publications and knowledge exchange activities (if you didn’t know about that page, you do now!). We try to keep the lists updated, but when things are busy it doesn’t always happen as often as we’d like. We’re pleased to say that it’s all back on track now, and every time we update the lists it’s always a nice reminder of what we’ve been doing.
• Expanding our publications page – as well as updating our publications, we’ve added in a new section on that page to focus on resources. A lot of our research projects result in new (and more often than not, free!) resources. While we share these in relevant places on our website, we thought it would be useful to bring them together in one place, so we did!
• Sharing our new Meeting Centre videos – we’re very pleased with the two short videos created as part of the Worcestershire Meeting Centres Community Support Programme and have made sure that as well as sharing them on social media, they are also available on our website. In addition to providing links to them in our new resources section (see above), they are available on our Meeting Centres page.
• Sharing the DemECH booklets – following the recent launch at the House of Lords, links to download the three booklets from our DemECH research have been included in the relevant section on our current research webpage, and before you ask, yes they are also in our new resources section!
• Adding information about our new research project – our ‘Crossing the Line’ project has been added to our current research webpage, so you can find out more about what we’re doing and we’ll keep adding to it as the project progresses.
• Making our Meeting Centre newsletters available – we realised that our Meeting Centre newsletters only get circulated to our Meeting Centre mailing list, when really they should be available more widely. To rectify this, we’ve added a new page on the Meeting Centre blog where we can link to all the newsletters, so if you want to find out what’s been going on feel free to take a look. I’m not sure why we didn’t do this sooner when we already share our ADS newsletters on our ADS blog!
• Sharing Meeting Centre locations – although it’s a bit of a movable feast with new Meeting Centres opening all the time, we’ve added another new page on our Meeting Centre blog site to say where you can find Meeting Centres across the UK. If you run a Meeting Centre and you can’t see yourself on there (or we’ve got your details wrong), please email j.bray@worc.ac.uk and we’ll get it sorted.

So there you go, nothing earth shattering or amazing, but a few minor things that have been going on to hopefully make things a bit easier. These sorts of things tend to be happening behind the scenes all the time, and there are probably many other examples we could have shared. So let’s celebrate the small things every now and again, because they all add up!

A period of change

As usual, there’s a lot going on within the Association for Dementia Studies at the moment, so to help you (and us!) keep track here’s a brief update.

Coming to an end

We’ve got a few projects due to finish in the next couple of months, such as:

• The Herefordshire Dementia Voices (HDV) evaluation, which is looking at the extent to which the HDV project met its intended outcomes of finding and hearing the voices of people affected by dementia. If you’d like to share your views on this project, you don’t have long – our online survey closes very soon so don’t miss out!
• Worcester Life Stories, which comprises two online platforms (Know Your Place and Life Stories Herefordshire and Worcestershire) has been the subject of a few previous blogs, and again you don’t have much time to share your views and feedback with us using the following surveys.
  • Link to Know Your Place Worcester survey
  • Link to Life Stories Herefordshire and Worcestershire survey
• The Get Real with Meeting Centres project is in its final phase of pulling all of our findings together and working out how to present and share them with different audiences. We’re consulting with various stakeholders to make sure we get it right, and have some exciting plans for creating both booklets and videos to explore different ways of making our findings accessible.
• The ‘Embed’ phase of our Meeting Centres work is due to end soon, but have no fear! We’ll be continuing to work on Meeting Centres, primarily focusing on keeping our existing Meeting Centre network going and continuing to support new Meeting Centres to get up and running.
• The DemECH project which has been looking at Supporting People Living with Dementia In Extra Care Housing is in the reporting phase, and we hope to be able to share the outputs with you in the near future.

Beyond research, our September cohort of students on our Postgraduate Certificate in Person-Centred Dementia Studies has recently submitted their final assignments, so best of luck to everyone!

Hennell Award Launch 2023

We’ve had blog posts about The Hennell Award before, most recently announcing the 2021-2022 winner Stu Wright, and we’re pleased to announce that nominations for the 2022-2023 Award are now being accepted.

The Hennell Award celebrates innovation and excellence in dementia care, and is opened to anyone who has taken part in one of our education or training courses. Have a look at the list below and see if they apply to you.

• Our Postgraduate Certificate modules – have you taken your learning back into practice and made a difference to the people you work with? Maybe you’ve studied on our ‘Enabling Environments’ module, made your care environment more dementia friendly and seen the impact of those changes. Maybe the ‘Advanced Dementia’ module has inspired you to think differently about pain assessment.
• We deliver courses for professional groups and organisations, such as care providers – think about what’s changed as a result of those courses. Maybe you’ve carried out a VIPS assessment using the Care Fit for VIPS toolkit and have made changes based on your findings. Maybe you’ve been able to share your learning with colleagues.
• If you’ve been on our Meeting Centres online training you’re also eligible – have you set up a Meeting Centre following the course? Maybe you’ve been able to measure the impact that your Meeting Centre is having on the members and carers who attend. Maybe you’ve used what you learnt on the course to overcome a particular challenge.
• Last, but by no means least, you can also be part of the Hennell Award if you’ve been on our Championing Physical Activity for People Affected by Dementia course (please check with us for latest dates and fees) – have you noticed a difference in your practice? Maybe you’ve introduced physical activity into your existing work with people with dementia. Maybe you’ve adapted your exercise class to make it more dementia friendly and inclusive.

Basically, there are multiple ways that you could be our next Hennell Award winner, and we want to hear from you. You can nominate yourself (don’t be shy, why not celebrate and be proud of what you’re achieving?!), or you can nominate someone else if you know a friend or colleague who is doing great work and deserves to be recognised. Find out more about previous winners and also get a copy of the nomination form from our website.

You’ve got until 3^rd July to get your nominations in so there’s plenty of time to get thinking, but don’t leave it until the last minute!

Having an impact

Starting a new year can often make people a bit reflective, and here at the Association for Dementia Studies we’re no different. We’ve been involved in numerous research projects over the years, with a lot of that research feeding into and underpinning our education. While we’re proud of what we’ve done, it tends to be a bit odd when a project finishes as we don’t always get to see what happens next. Who reads our reports and takes any recommendations on board? Who uses our resources and makes a change as a result? Who takes their learning back to the workplace and makes a change to their practice or work setting? Who benefits from what we’re doing and are they local, national or even international?

Basically, how do we know that we’re having an impact and how significant is that?

In terms of our education, we do get some feedback from students if their course involves completing a short project or if they apply for the Hennell Award where they are required to show what they’ve done as a result of being on one of our courses. With our research it can be trickier, especially if the output is a resource that can be freely downloaded. How can we reach people if we don’t know who they are? We often don’t have the time and resources to do any follow-up activities either, as other research projects have generally taken over.

Combining two different roles

This week we hear from Teresa Atkinson who is a Senior Research Fellow here at the Association for Dementia Studies (ADS) but also a lecturer on our Postgraduate Certificate in Person-Centred Dementia Studies, specifically the modules around enabling environments and supporting family carers. Over to you Teresa…

Being a lecturer and a researcher is an interesting journey full of self-reflection and constant learning. In this week’s blog, I bring together a number of things that have happened recently which I’ve been reflecting on.

As a researcher of 20+ years (where did that go!) I have listened to the voices of people affected by their cognitive impairment in many walks of life. This was what excited me to become involved in training and now in education – sharing the stories and experiences of the many voices I had heard to help professionals in practice to understand the funny, sad and interesting lives of the people we support.

As an educator, I’m deeply proud of the work we do at ADS to share our knowledge; knowledge which comes from years of practice and years of research. But this is also a learning journey for me; learning from people affected by dementia; learning from our students (all professionals in practice) and learning from my colleagues.

Research update

We regularly have to provide updates to the wider university to say what’s going on with our research within the Association for Dementia Studies, and it’s actually quite a nice exercise to do as it helps us realise just how much we’re doing on a daily basis. It’s a chance to pause and reflect, and as that feels quite appropriate at the moment we thought we’d share our latest research update with you. So, just what have we been up to between May and August?

Now and next

Every few months we take stock of what’s been going on and have a look at what we’ve got coming up, and now feels like a good time to just that!

Conferences

We’re in that weird period of some conferences being online, some returning to in-person events, and some using a hybrid approach. In May we went to the Alzheimer’s Society Conference in London, and one of our PhD Students Nathan Stephens wrote up his thoughts for a Dementia Researcher blog. We also presented at an internal University of Worcester Research Seminar, looking at ‘The challenges of reaching the right people’. This is something we’ve considered in a previous blog post, but this time we focused on our experiences with two current projects: Worcester Life Stories and Get Real with Meeting Centres. Part of the presentation looked at the challenges faced in our Get Real Work Package looking at why people don’t attend Meeting Centres.

Introducing CAMBUS

This week we’d like to let you know about an exciting new initiative that has started in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The Coffee and Memory Bus (CAMBUS) scheme currently comprises two minibuses/vans, which will travel around Herefordshire and Worcestershire reaching out to people in their community and providing a safe and friendly space for people to enjoy a tea or coffee, have a chat, find out useful information, and even start creating their own life story on the Herefordshire & Worcestershire Life Stories platform.

It can sometimes be difficult for people to access support services or find out about what is available to them, so this initiative aims to take that support and information to people where they are. Maybe they have concerns about their memory or a relative’s memory and aren’t sure what the next step is. Maybe they just want to be a bit more social by having a drink and a chat with others. CAMBUS provides those opportunities.

Four seasons in one month

A quick bonus blog for you, as we wanted to update you on Senior Research Fellow Teresa Atkinson’s 100km dog walking challenge in March. Over to Teresa:

The March challenge has ended!

Whilst I was never in doubt that I would rise to the challenge of walking 100km in a month, it’s certainly had its ups and downs. Who would have thought we could go from 19 degrees to snow in the matter of a few days? So here is a photo of me on my last, triumphant day, looking a little euphoric and wrapped up.

Teresa and Oska