Pathways Through Dementia Blog

2015 seemed to be characterised by conference-going in the end but I learnt a lot and met some amazing people, not least Mary Sherwood from the Meteorological Office who has set up an initiative called Dementia Friendly Workplaces. We are going to be working together in 2016 on day conferences for HR managers who are Read More

Would you expect to go to a conference on the Mental Capacity and Mental Health Acts and have a rip roaring time? Silly question. It’s always lovely to be surprised in life although I would have enjoyed the subject matter either way: On Friday I went to the 2015 Annual Taking Stock conference at the Read More

On Tuesday I was thrilled to be on the panel at the Dementia Challenge Conference in London where a brilliant range of speakers educated us about various dementia related topics. Here I pick out some of the points that I found the most interesting and encouraging: Alistair Burns could not be with us but sent Read More

Every year, when Dementia Awareness Week rolls round, I think of how far we have come in the last year in terms of how we engage with people with dementia and their carers. Dementia Friends and Dementia Friendly Communities have made enormous strides in this area and are to be highly commended on their passion, Read More

I fully approve of the aims of the Care Act which seeks to move service users from a position of passivity to one of empowerment. I think that the suggested care cap on residential care home fees will appease those who see their savings/assets/inheritance swallowed up by the local authority and are deeply unhappy about Read More

Very interesting You&Yours on Radio Four last week about the Care Act and how it will affect people. A caller had been trying for weeks to ascertain from the local authority when and how he ought to be recording the care costs his relative was incurring so that they knew when they had reached the Read More

I speak to many people on the phone or email who are facing a situation where they are at odds with the health professionals about where their relative (who has serious memory problems) should live. Usually the person in question is in hospital on an unrelated health matter and it has been decided that to Read More

Last week You&Yours (Radio Four) had an interesting article led by a listener who had discovered that over many years his sibling had been withdrawing large amounts of his mother’s money out of her savings account, probably without her knowledge and/or consent. The piece highlighted the difficulties in addressing this kind of financial abuse as Read More

Dear All, As you can see we have been targetted by thousands of spammers over the summer who have run amock as my three year old has run amock and kept me too busy to turn my attentions to my Blog! Our website designer is hopefully going to deal with this shortly. In the meantime, Read More

On March 25th, Employers for Carers published a research paper titled ‘Supporting employees who are caring for someone with dementia’, the conclusions of which echo that of the Institute for Public Policy Research’s 2013 paper ‘The sandwich generation: Older women balancing work and care’. Essentially there are many many people who are working and caring Read More