We're marking Dementia Awareness Week by speaking to Vic Lyons from Admiral Nurses. Under the Dementia UK umbrella (www.dementiauk.org), Admiral Nurses provide emotional and practical support to families dealing with dementia. In the conversation, we discuss the definition and importance of dementia, the three stages of the disease and highlight the Herbert Protocol, a crucial resource for families to help locate missing individuals with dementia - a protocol that isn't nearly as well known about as it should be.
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"Dementia is a word like an umbrella term... lots of people have heard of Alzheimer's, and that is still the one that we see most commonly diagnosed, then you also have vascular dementia, which, again, equally commonly diagnosed these days. And then there's actually 200 types of dementia...dementia is more than just memory loss.... It can be personality changes, difficulty in making decisions, even sometimes expressing how you feel and communicate, and perhaps getting lost in familiar places or not being able to do things that you would ordinarily be able to do. It's a progressive condition"
https://www.dementiauk.org/information-and-support/about-dementia/stages-of-dementia/
On the Herbert Protocol: "You can do it all online, because I know for lots of families, when you need to submit it to the local police force, maybe they're not open, or you can't get hold of them, or that's great if that person's in the area. But of course, if they go to a different area, or they're visiting family somewhere else, the local police have it in their station. It's actually how do they get it to the area? So what Medic Alert started doing very recently, was having that form digitalised and stored on their system. It's free of charge, so if a person does go missing, anybody can ring the Medic Alert number, and they'll be able to get that relevant details to where they where they may be needed. So really good service out there"
https://www.dementiauk.org/information-and-support/living-with-dementia/herbert-protocol/
https://www.medicalert.org.uk/
On conversations with employers: I think it's it's important to have those conversations with your employers and say, I'm a working carer, mum's got dementia, I need to go to her appointments or whatever it is you need to do. We did a survey last year, and we know that carers talk about the how challenging it is to ask for help, to reach out, to acknowledge this is difficult, and feeling guilty that they should be able to cope. But we're not super human. We can only cope with with what we can cope with. So actually having that conversation and saying this is the reality, as you might find, that your employer can do something like offer you flexible working, or there may be something they can do to help, but if you don't have that conversation, and you leave it, it usually ends up with situations that you wouldn't want happening"
https://www.dementiauk.org/information-and-support/dementia-at-work/supporting-employees-affected-by-dementia/
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