Dementia Awareness Week championed throughout the care sector

This week we welcome Dementia Awareness Week, a time in which mental health professionals and elderly care campaigners look to encourage a greater public awareness of the challenges that more and more families are facing. The UK’s ageing population means that dementia-related conditions, the most common of which is Alzheimer’s, are on the increase and charities like Age UK, Dementia UK and the Alzheimer’s Society have made it their mission to ensure that those in power listen to families that depend on care services and strive for a long-term commitment to deal effectively with care provision. The Care Services minister, Paul Burstow, has spoken this week of the need to transform the public mentality in relation to dementia that leads to many ‘avoiding people with the condition, making them feel isolated and stigmatised’, though it is not just in the high seat of Government where the issue is being tackled, but throughout community life at all levels.

For those who feel the need to contribute to raising awareness, there are a wide range of fundraising activities that people are taking part in throughout the UK, such as popular Memory Walks, running and cycling events, together with a sampling of more extreme sports like abseiling and parachute jumping. Many care homes themselves are also looking to get involved, like Acacia Lodge in Henley, who are holding open days for their local communities to attend, as well as Anchor Homes, who own more than ninety UK residential care facilities, and are holding free ‘information sessions’ to help pass their expertise onto friends and relatives of dementia sufferers.

Also adding their weight to the national campaign are colleges such as University College Falmouth, who have organised poster campaigns in collaboration with Arts for Health and the NHS – two bodies who are also keen to produce further national TV and radio advertisements in order to keep issues like ageism firmly imbedded in the public psyche. There are also significant attempts by home care charities to encourage more people to consider voluntary sector employment, being an often overlooked area that offers more career opportunities than young people realise.

Anyone else keen to campaign will find every opportunity to make an contribution through well-organised networks that can easily be signed up for online, such as via charities like the Alzheimer’s Society who are utilising the power of the Internet to reach more and more people. Numerous Twitter threads and other online forums are also alive with discussion of dementia and other healthcare-related issues, which look likely to become a worthy national obsession for many years until services are stabilised around the needs of a population that has never had such a large percentage of elderly citizens.

Other organisations to get involved include the national helpline Admiral Nurses Direct, who have extended their capabilities in order to reach out to dementia sufferers and those who care for them, with one of the many barriers to overcome in relation to the onset of mental health conditions being that families often feel left in the dark with no one to turn to for advice.

There is also a new range of books being launched for children, written by the author Virginia Ironside and supported by leading care provider Barchester Healthcare, inspired by the difficulty parents and teachers often face in explaining mental health-related conditions to young children. Such publications are an important step in fighting the stigma against dementia at an early age, a method which has proved successful in fights against racism over the last few decades.

All of these efforts are occurring in the face of widespread anxiety over public sector cuts, but there is also an overriding sense of opportunism amongst campaigners that cannot be ignored. What better time than during a new political era, at a time when the entire structure of public financing is due for massive change anyway, in which to convince ourselves that major steps can be taken in the right direction.