In this guest blog, Tony Hall from the BDAA discusses his goal of making Bristol the number one dementia-friendly city in the UK.
Bristol Dementia Action Alliance (BDAA) was launched in July 2013 with the objective of “Enabling Bristol to become THE Dementia Friendly City of the UK”.
We do this by arranging dementia awareness sessions for any business, school, children’s group club, community and faith groups. In fact – anybody! The sessions generally last an hour and are free of charge.
The BDAA works in partnership with We Care Home Improvements to support their staff to learn more about the condition and become dementia-friendly. Julie Derrick is their local Dementia Friends Champion (and she’s a member of BDAA). She delivers Dementia Friends sessions to those wanting to know more.
We also organise and run dementia workshops for those people working in the community with the over 50’s, particularly those living with dementia. Four half-day workshops were arranged in 2019 and are proving to be very useful and popular. Four more are already programmed for 2020.
We also launched the Happy Days Memory Café in November 2015. It’s for carers and people living with dementia. The club operates on the first Friday of the month at Westbury Baptist Church, Reedley Rd BS9 3TE from 14.00. – 16.00.
The BDAA works in partnership with other agencies in Bristol that support people living with dementia and their carers. This includes BRACE, Bristol Older Peoples Forum, Linkage, St. Peter’s Hospice, Carers Support Centre, Alzheimer’s Society, and Dementia Wellbeing Service.
Building a dementia-friendly city together
Some other examples of what we’ve been doing are:
- We are supporting St Peter’s Hospice in all their staff and volunteers to become Dementia Friends.
- We are working with Bristol & South Glos Girl-guiding. Over 900 girls and young women are dementia aware,
- Working with Youth Moves and NCS (National Citizens Service) approximately 1000 teenagers are dementia aware.
- Bristol Airport is working to become a dementia-friendly airport.
There are quite a lot of resources on our website, which are free downloads. We are continually updating the site as we want to help and support those searching for information. You can contact us via our website: www.bdaa.org.uk
This post was written by Tony Hall, Chairman of the Bristol Dementia Action Alliance.
BDAA won a Voscur!
Tony and the BDAA team recently won a Resilience award at the Voscur Awards for Social Impact. The award recognises the action the BDAA has taken to build and strengthen its resilience and adaptability to respond to new and emerging challenges. A big congratulations to you all for a job well done!
Find out about Dementia support in your area…
Dementia Friendly-Dementia Forum
For anywhere else, you can search here
Did you know?
- We Care Home Improvements has been recognised as an organisation that is working to become Dementia Friendly by the Dementia Action Alliance
- You can find out how to make your home more Dementia Friendly here
