St Margaret's Benefice

Dementia Support...

Sadly, but understandably, the launch of this community project is on hold indefinitely during the Covid-19 health emergency.

St Margaret’s Community Dementia Café

We now have the go ahead to start this Café.

We’re planning to launch it in March and hold it in the cricket pavilion, twice a month. The exact day of the week that it will run is still to be decided.

We now need a range of volunteers! There are quite a few jobs we need to cover: setting up; “Welcomers”; people to sit and talk with visitors; tea and coffee makers. We hope to have lots of volunteers so the commitment of any individual will not be too heavy! Training in relating to those with dementia and understanding their needs will be provided.

We’ll be contacting the village groups in December and January to inform as many people as possible about what we are doing and hopefully persuading some of them to join us.

What will the café offer? It will be an opportunity for those living with dementia and those who care for them to come and have tea, coffee and a chat in a friendly safe space, though that’s not all. We’ll have some games, music and other activities, and will invite speakers along from time to time from organisations that can help people to live well with Dementia.

If anyone is interested in becoming a volunteer please contact:

Liz (email lmcnaughton@hotmail.com or tel 01304 851960)

or discuss this further with one of the café working group - Bob Coles, Margaret Jones, Liz McNaughton, Anna Newton, and Gill Tipper.

We look forward to hearing from you… 

We've made some real progress since our last update, & we're now wanting to push ahead with setting up a Dementia Cafe. We'll need support for this, and are now setting up a steering group to manage the set up & then running of the Cafe.

So what have we done since the last update on 6th May?

Roadshow on 24 May & Dementia needs assessment form
The roadshow went very well, was well attended, it raised the profile of Dementia in the village and we collected around 30 needs assessment forms. This told us that there is good support in the village and gave us some ideas for what we need to include.

Visit to Greatstone (Romney Marsh) group on 13 June
This was great because it gave us some guidelines as to how to set up our Cafe, & thoughts regarding funding and governance. They are happy to help & support us, & since they're a rural community there are quite a few similarities with our community here.

Sub-group meeting 22 June
We discussed the roadshow, the needs forms & the Greatstone visit & we're all decided that we should go ahead!

What do we need to do now?

1. Set up a steering group & allocate people to consider the various aspects (funding, governance, safeguarding, volunteers and training, materials needed to run the cafe etc.)
2. At the 31st July meeting we need to find out who can help us & in what capacity - there will be lots of things to do & we can spread the load across our wider group.
3. Confirm a venue for the Cafe - we think the cricket pavilion is an ideal venue, they have availability & are OK for us to hold it there.
4. Decide when to launch it - we're aiming for Oct & the idea is to run it fortnightly. We still need to think about the day/time of the week that will work best.

So please come along on Wed 31st July, 7:30pm to 9pm at the Cricket pavilion (CT15 6HU), and can you confirm if you can attend, & if anyone needs directions to the cricket pavilion just let me know. There is good parking there.

This is an exciting & important initiative for our community & we'll need lots of support to make a success of it.  

Hope you can make it!

The Kent Dementia Action Alliance are a group of Kent organisations who want to work together to better meet the needs of people with dementia so everyone can live well within their communities. A wide range of partners are now members of the Kent Dementia Action Alliance, a full list of members along with their individual action plans can be found on the Dementia Action Alliance website. Their 24hour helpline is 0800 500 3014.
 

The membership of the Kent Dementia Action Alliance and the more local Alliances and Dementia friendly community forums are ‘open’ to all. Organisations, businesses, groups and residents can get involved at the level which best suits them. This could be by becoming Full members, Supporters or by joining a smaller local Dementia Friendly Community forum.

There are also Dementia Friends, an Alzheimer's Society initiative. A Dementia Friend learns a little bit more about what it's like to live with dementia and then turns that understanding into action - anyone of any age can be a Dementia Friend. Whether you attend a face-to-face Dementia Friends Information Session or watch our online video, Dementia Friends is about learning more about dementia and the small ways you can help. From telling friends about Dementia Friends to visiting someone you know living with dementia, every action counts.

There are, of course, many causes and types of dementia. One cause can be alcohol abuse, with an increasingly strong link being identified between alcoholism and dementia. Rehab Recovery are an organisation that specialise in rehab and detox services, from alcohol, drugs, eating disorders and gambling. They have an article on their website written by Ollie Clark regarding alcoholism and dementia which you can read here.. This article provides a clear insight into how alcoholism impacts the brain, and with the growing concern in the news regarding excessive, and often unrecognised, alcohol consumption in the middle aged, this is not something that should be ignored.