Action for dementia care and support - Communication and dementia

Welcome to the third of my five blog posts for UK Dementia Action Week 2018 (DAW2018). 

This year Dementia Awareness Week is renamed Dementia Action Week to reflect the need for action for people affected by dementia rather than only focusing on awareness.

In this spirit, I’m sharing the ‘Key Messages’ from my dementia care and support training modules. The training, devised entirely by me and heavily based on personal experiences from my dad's life with dementia and the many other people I've met who are living with dementia, is something I've delivered to numerous frontline social care staff as a standalone learning experience or to supplement the bespoke training and mentoring that I provide to individual services and organisations.

I've never shared these materials online before, and I'm hoping by doing so now I will inspire positive action amongst health and social care providers who are supporting people living with dementia and their families.

Day 3: Communication and dementia

My third module is called ‘Communication' and covers: 

• The building blocks of communication
• Environments and sensory loss
• What a positive interaction looks and sounds like
• Talking and listening
• Non-verbal communication
• Responsiveness
• Life stories
• Teamwork and creativity
• Feelings and emotions
• Validation verses reality orientation
• Coping with communication difficulties

It concludes with:

For me these key messages, whilst very basic to many of us, are something every person providing care and support for anyone affected by dementia should live and breathe by.

Of course, there is so much more to what is in a 3-hour training session than I could convey in a short blog, but to give you a flavour of what this is like in 'real life' the module is the start of opening up conversations about communicating with a person who is living with dementia, and takes a step-by-step approach that looks at every element that goes into creating positive and meaningful interactions. 

Everything I do asks learners to put themselves into the shoes of the person, so in this module learners experience a demo of unpleasant communication examples, reflect on a film featuring a person living with dementia, and use 'real life' scenarios to think about how they might respond in particular communication situations.

**ACTION FOR HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE PROVIDERS**

PLEASE PRINT THE KEY MESSAGES IMAGE ABOVE AND PIN IT ONTO A NOTICEBOARD THAT ALL OF YOUR STAFF CAN SEE.

For more information on my training and mentoring consultancy work, please see my website: http://www.bethbritton.com.

Tomorrow (24 May 2018) I will look at 'Living with dementia'.

Until then...

You can follow me on Twitter: @bethyb1886
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