To support me to achieve these aims, I recently launched an initiative to get staff from across Bristol Community Health to act as dementia champions. The dementia champions will support our goals for dementia and help create a network to provide information, guidance, support and best practice sharing.
On Wednesday September 18, I led Bristol Community Health's first dementia champions' workshop and was delighted with the response. Staff from across the organisation, who had volunteered to act as dementia champions attended the morning's event. Forty dementia champions attended, including both clinical and non-clinical staff, who have a genuine interest and enthusiasm to support people with dementia, as well as their carers and families, to live well with dementia.
Bristol Community Health has developed close partnerships with voluntary organisations providing services for people who have dementia so the champions' workshop included updates from the Alzheimer's Society, the Red Cross and the Integrated Carers' Support Team. Bristol Community Health's Learning Difficulties Dementia Lead, Virginia Wilde, also informed staff about memory assessments for people with learning difficulties and we learnt that people who have learning difficulties may develop dementia at a younger age and early symptoms of dementia may be masked by the patient having a learning difficulty.
Jane Buswell, Independent Consultant Nurse, also gave an inspirational talk about human relationships, entering the world of the person who has dementia, creating dementia friendly communities, and the essentials of good nursing care.
The morning achieved its aim to bring our champions and leaders together to discuss their role and come away with action plans to take back to their teams.
Feedback from the session was highly positive with attendees describing it as "excellent"; "a great morning"; "I can better understand the impact of dementia on the individual" and "It got you thinking of ways to engage with a person who has dementia".
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