Thanks to funding from the Churchill Foundation’s Activate Fund, I am delighted to tell you that my course, Talking Sense Online: Audiology and Eye Care is now available for professionals in these industries in the UK to access. Following my fellowship researching the effect on dementia on the senses, I was supported by HammondCare to produce my findings as a book – Talking Sense, Living with Sensory Challenges and Dementia. Talking Sense is the culmination of more than a decade of research after I was diagnosed with younger onset dementia in 2006. It shows who to go to for help, where suppor ..read more

Enhancing access is a key ambition of Connecting People Connecting Support – the Allied Health Professions (AHP) framework people living with dementia. In mid-2022 the Aberdeen City community adult AHPs met to consider how we could enhance access locally in a way that was manageable for professionals and accessible for those who need to access that information. With the support of the local Alzheimer Scotland Dementia Resource Centre we decided to run a pilot event aiming to provide people with a range of self-management information. We decided to use the resource centre as it is a central lo ..read more

https://ihub.scot/improvement-programmes/focus-on-dementia/ Who are we? The Focus on Dementia team are part of the improvement hub (ihub) in Healthcare Improvement Scotland. Our role is to support improvements in the quality of dementia care and support in Scotland. This helps support the implementation of Scotland’s National Dementia Strategies. There are other improvement advisors like myself in the team and there are project and administration staff to help our programmes and projects run smoothly. We also have a clinical lead psychiatrist, psychologist and AHP in our team to provide clinic ..read more

Hi, my name is Elizabeth Hewitt I am a band 5 Occupational Therapist I work in an acute dementia ward. I have always been fascinated by how music can influence mood and evoke memories and how we can remember the words to songs we have not heard for many years. We have used music to reduce stress and distress within the ward setting but I wondered what the impact watching music videos would have on stress and distress behaviours. Introduction Music is known to be very therapeutic and to reduce stress and distress (Sung &.Chang 2005). Many studies have been carried out about music therapy ..read more

A Daughter’s Perspective “Hi Fiona, I hope you are both okay. I just wanted to give you an update: I can see from the record that the end-of-life team do not have availability at the moment…” Context I took the decision in early 2021 to write about examples of our experiences caring for mum and dad who both lived with dementia. Experiences which have shaped my commitment to support and advance a skilled and confident Allied Health Professional (AHP) workforce, in partnership with people living with dementia. So, in the lead up to dad’s brief move into a care home during 2021, I wrote and shar ..read more

There are some interesting thoughts, and perhaps even misconceptions, around what constitutes a practice-based learning (PrBL) placement for Allied Health Professions (AHP) pre-registration students. One misconception might be that student placement learning has to take place on an NHS ward surrounded by NHS-only staff. There isn’t anything ‘wrong’ with this and we wouldn’t want anyone to think that we were suggesting that there is. But health and social care interventions and delivery don’t just happen in hospitals wards and AHPs don’t just work for the NHS. AHPs also work in other areas suc ..read more

https://www.brainhealth.scot/ When I was tasked to create Instagram posts for the @ahpdementia page, I was stumped. Despite being in my 20s, I had not had much experience with Instagram, and I did not know what my overall message would be.  At first, I considered writing quality of life tips for people living with dementia and their carers. However, I decided against this after researching into the average age of Instagram users (most Instagrammers fall within the 25-34 age range). Wanting to make the most of this opportunity and reach younger generations, I decided to focus my posts on B ..read more

http://www.brainhealth.scot/myamazingbrain Brain Health Scotland is on a mission to inspire and empower everyone to protect their brain health and reduce their risk of diseases that lead to dementia. We do this partly through clinical services such as early disease detection and prevention plans and through public health campaigning and education. The onset of diseases such as dementia is driven by many factors, some of which we cannot change, such as our family history and genetics, but many of which we can, such as our lifestyle.  It’s never too early for people to start thinking a ..read more

Five blogs from 2022 https://letstalkaboutdementia.wordpress.com/ A brief overview of our blogs from 2022 We launched our weekly blog in June 2014 and through our weekly blogs posts we’ve found new ways of connecting colleagues, carers and people living with dementia with each other. We’ve created a whole new kind of community that lets people share their work and passion in dementia.  In this week’s blog we are sharing five blogs from 2022, enjoy. Willy’s story – a very personal journey learning and adapting to living with dementia In conversation with 3 occupational therapist ..read more

Never in the history of mankind did not talking about something scary make it disappear https://letstalkaboutdementia.wordpress.com/ Our weekly blog was launched in June 2014, hosted and supported by Alzheimer Scotland and led by Elaine Hunter, national allied health professional consultant at Alzheimer Scotland. Since April 2014, we have posted 505 blogs. In 2022 we shared 55 blogs, writing over 44.2k words. We are reaching a truly international audience, people reading the blogs in the UK, USA, India, Brazil, Denmark and many more. We have a host of blog writers including our allied health p ..read more