The Guernsey Alzheimer’s Association has introduced ‘dementia suits’ to the island to help carers understand what life is like for their loved ones and patients.
The idea is, you wear the suit and accessories – which hinder your movements, senses, and coordination – while trying out every day tasks.
A demonstration was given yesterday by podcaster Ollie Guillou and Channel TV’s Luke Keohane.
The dementia simulation experience is new to the island, and Admiral Nurse Michelle Martel thinks it will make a big difference.
“My colleague Lottie used to do the sensory training in Jersey when she worked for another establishment, and we now do the training on island for HSC. Lottie does a lot of the training in community care homes, and it came up in conversation about these dementia suits and Lottie had a chat with Dementia Friendly Guernsey and the Alzheimer’s Association about using them.
“We want, first and foremost, for them to be used by people working with elderly people and people living with a dementia. We can do textbook training, we can do classes or face to face training, but a lot of people learn by experience, and there’s nothing better than understanding physically how it feels to be impacted with arthritis, osteoarthritis, a hearing problem, an eyesight problem, being 85 and just life in general, you get aches and pains. Then on top of that, we’ve got that cognitive impairment where somebody might not understand and it takes time. So we want to take this to the classrooms. We want to take this to the care homes. We want to take it into our HSC training. And we really want everybody to experience it, so you can fully immerse in this scenario, and hopefully develop even more empathy for the people they’re working with, with more compassion and a better insight. And how to really give somebody personalised care.”
Ms Martel says there isn’t a definitive figure for how many people are living with a dementia in Guernsey, but with around 980,000 people diagnosed in the UK it’s believed that there will be around 1,200 people affected in Guernsey.
“What we do know is, last year, from June to June, we had 201 people diagnosed on island with a dementia variety. Alzheimer’s is the most common, and that takes up about 60% of the diagnosis. So Alzheimer’s is the most predominant, but last year, we had 201 people, on island alone, diagnosed in 12 months.”
Guernsey’s Admiral Nurses work directly with carers to improve services for dementia patients.
“We started three years ago, and we are all about working with the families and the carers, whether it’s just a bit of emotional support, whether it’s a bit of education surrounding current behaviors that the loved one will be experiencing, or wanting to learn different ways how to approach situations. Some people even ask us what is progression going to be like? They keep hearing about progression. ‘It’s a progressive illness’, ‘your loved one’s progressed a bit more’, so a lot of people are saying, ‘what is that?’ ‘What does it look like?’ So we look at what type of dementia they have, and then we’ll give them some education around that particular dementia, how that may progress, how their behaviours might be related to that, and things to look out for.
“We also give people community advice and we give people information in the community about what services are available, whether it’s a third party agency, a voluntary agency, HSC, and we try and just make sure people are connected.” So social inclusion, just through all these, these wonderful charities, we’ve got an island Absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.”