Saddleworth Dementia Friends’ Champion, Helen Morris from Dobcross, shares her thoughts about dementia looking at ‘Procedural Memory and Occupation’
In each Dementia Friends Information Session there is something new to consider and this month I am going to tackle one of the thorniest problems encountered.
We don’t often consider how skilled we are just going about our everyday lives or how important this sense of occupation is to us – the ability to do things that are useful.
Imagine the moment you found you could carry a container full of liquid or knot the perfect tie or change gear or make an omelette. Parts of our brain coordinate movement, sequence actions and predict the results simultaneously.
Now imagine one day you are doing something perfectly ordinary but your brain just can’t make the right connection. If just one part of a procedure is lost, it makes the whole process impossible. This can happen with dementia and it can make people seem strangely clumsy when before they were extremely deft.
So what do we do? Well, we take over! We might tell ourselves we are caring for someone; we’ve been brought up to make a cup of tea for dad and we are just so much quicker anyway. But what we actually do is deprive people of the dignity of being able to accomplish basic tasks.
Instead we should support the person to keep occupied with daily chores because this maintains a sense of purpose and self worth. We need to make time and have patience and do things ‘with’ people rather than ‘for’ or ‘to’ them.
This would also help to make our Saddleworth community more dementia friendly. We can make time, provide prompts with words or signs, or find technical aids to support the part of the process found difficult.
For example tablet dispensers can help maintain self-medication – ask your pharmacist what is available for memory issues or visit www.atdementia.org.uk. This will provide one more step towards becoming dementia friendly through maintaining ‘occupation’.
Learning these skills now may help us all. By living longer it is likely many of us will learn to live with dementia ourselves or support someone else who is close to us.
For details of local Dementia Friends Sessions run by Helen across Saddleworth please visit http://www.close-communications.com/dementia-friends
