Although our ‘Get Real with Meeting Centres’ project finished last year with the celebratory launch event taking place back in July 2023, our work to disseminate and promote the findings are ongoing. We’ve had a bit of a flurry recently with three articles being published in the last couple of months, so it felt like a good time to take stock and bring everyone up to date with what’s been going on. Recent articles All three of these new articles are open access, which means that they are freely available via the links given and you don’t have to pay to read them. Reaching people and managing ..read more

Recently the University of Worcester’s School of Art invited researchers to submit a design brief about a research project that students in the second year of their BA(Hons) Graphic Design course could use to design and produce into an infographic. We were thrilled to submit a design brief about our ‘Championing Physical Activity for People Affected by Dementia’ project (CPA) and the outcomes from the online course that we developed as a result of the project. The design brief was taken on by University of Worcester student Jack Smith, and we’re delighted that we can now share his infographic ..read more

A few years ago the Association for Dementia Studies carried out a research project to help care homes implement and deliver Namaste Care to provide better care for people living with advanced dementia. It was a great project to work on, and ever since we’ve been looking for opportunities to take that work further to see the positive results replicated in more care homes and other settings. We’re delighted to say that thanks to funding from the Marie Curie Research Impact Fund, we’re now in a position to do just that! For those who may not be aware, Namaste Care in a multi-component sensory i ..read more

Early on a Monday morning in the middle of June isn’t necessarily a great time for most of us, but that’s when we held the second session of the Meeting Centres International group and we were pleased to have representation from Meeting Centres in England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Poland and Zimbabwe. People were welcomed to the session by Dr Shirley Evans before being invited to share updates on what’s happening in different areas. We started with an update from Paul Shaw (Dunblane) about the situation in Scotland, as Meeting Centres seem to have taken off their, particularly with the recen ..read more

…and the livin’ is easy. Well it might be according to Billie Holiday (and many other cover versions), but it doesn’t feel like it at the Association for Dementia Studies. Ok, so it might not technically be summer yet, and the weather hasn’t really helped, but many people think that the summer months at a university are nice and quiet as we’re not teaching students. While it’s true that the January modules on our Postgraduate Certificate in Person-Centred Dementia Studies have finished, things are definitely not slowing down for us. We’re already thinking about our September modules and gettin ..read more

The other day we realised that we’ve now published over 300 blogs (wow!!), and while we know quantity isn’t everything it got us thinking about a few things. In all the work we do, one of our main aims is for it to make a difference in practice, so once we’ve developed a resource such as a booklet or video we actually want people to use them. That’s why we try to promote them regularly through our social media channels, as a one-off post is likely to be missed by many of our followers. Although getting feedback can be difficult so we don’t necessarily know how people are using them or what imp ..read more

You might have noticed that we’ve recently been advertising online open evenings relating to our Postgraduate Certificate in Person-Centred Dementia Studies, and if you’ve been wondering what they’re about this short blog should hopefully shed some light. Our fully-online Postgraduate Certificate has been running successfully for nearly five years, and we’ve got an amazing group of students who have completed it as our recent alumni event shows. However, getting new students onto the course can sometimes be tricky. The course is not aimed at students in their late teens or early twenties for w ..read more

On a sunny Friday at the end of a busy Dementia Action Week we were pleased to welcome Sladana (Sladja) Pavkovic from the University of Tasmania, Australia, as presenter of a Meeting Centres webinar looking at ‘Past and future of the Meeting Centre Support Programme in a contrasting economic context’. Sladja has been visiting different UK Meeting Centres this week after previously being in the Netherlands, and was coming to us live from the Meeting Centre in Alton, Hampshire. After a welcome from Dr Shirley Evans, Sladja began by providing some background about her professional home at the Wic ..read more

At the beginning of May we held the third and final workshop for our Crossing the Line project which is looking at support for family carers providing personal care for people living with dementia. This time we had the pleasure of having Sean and Rob from Macreavy Media filming the event to feed into our findings and resources, and far from being scary they made it a very relaxed process. After an ice breaker session where we found out how good people were at lying – or maybe how rubbish we were at spotting lies – we were given a brief overview of the project from Dr Shirley Evans to make sure ..read more

This week we hand over to Gemma Moore, one of the Association for Dementia Studies PhD students to hear about their recent experiences at a symposium. Over to you Gemma… Hello, my name is Gemma Moore and I am currently researching how people living with dementia can experience mark making in Meeting Centres. My website can be found here and my Linked in blog here. Recently, I was accepted to participate in the Thriving Together Symposium – A symposium discussing ideas and experiences of couple hood, arts participation, and dementia. The event was hosted at The University of Sheffield and there ..read more