Dementia friendly communities

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  Becoming a dementia-friendly organisation

  Building a welcoming and inclusive community. Your invitation to join Dementia Australia’s community of dementia-friendly businesses and organisations
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  Half the story

  A step-by-step guide to respectful, engaging and accessible consultation with people impacted by dementia. It is an essential tool for community leaders, decision-makers and service providers who want to know how to better engage with people living with dementia, their families and carers.
  Half the Story was developed with the assistance of Dementia Advocates as well as the Consumer Engagement, Marketing, Dementia-Friendly Communities (DFC) and Policy teams. As one Advocate noted: “You cannot feel what it is like inside our minds. Without us, you only have half the story.”

• ‘People in the community’ are the challenge and the solution: Towards a dementia-friendly future Discussion Paper by Dementia Australia

  Publication Date: 2024

  "With the number of people in Australia living with dementia, along with the number of carers, friends and family, it is almost unbelievable that we are still having to talk about the limited awareness and understanding about the condition.
  This paper identifies the similarities between the results of a 2019 report and the 2023 AIHW Dementia Aware Survey, recognising that this lack of knowledge results in stigma, discrimination and social exclusion. As a person living with dementia, this saddens me. Why do people treat us differently? What have we done to deserve this? As a Dementia Advocate, it angers me. Why are people not listening? Why are they not changing their attitudes? All we are asking for is to be understood, respected and supported - just basic human rights."

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  The First Steps to Building a Dementia-Friendly Future by Dementia Australia

  Publication Date: 2024
  When you start seeing your world through the eyes of someone with dementia or their carer, you suddenly notice many hidden challenges – and many opportunities for improvement.

• Support. Encourage. Empower : Leading the way towards a Dementia-Friendly Community by Parliamentary Friends of Dementia

  Publication Date: 2021

  A dementia-friendly community is defined as a community of any size where people with dementia are understood, respected and supported. The concept has been embraced and developed over the last decade. Alzheimer’s Disease International identified two core objectives that underpin success in communities. The first is the desire to improve understanding of dementia and reduce stigma by meaningfully engaging people with dementia of all ages in their communities. Secondly these communities recognise the rights and capabilities of people with dementia and empower them to make decisions about their lives according to their individual capacities.
• Dementia language guidelines

  How to promote the consistent use of appropriate, inclusive and non stigmatising language when talking or writing about dementia and people living with dementia.
• How to design dementia- friendly care environments by Dementia Australia

  The designed environment can have a major impact on a person living with
  dementia. This Help Sheet will outline the key principles to enable you to make simple changes at home or in a care facility to help make the best of everyday life.

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  The Dementia-Friendly Home: a video guide

  This interactive video gives you practical tips to make your home safer and more accessible for people living with dementia. You can move from room to room at your discretion.
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  Engaging in Community: webinar

  In this webinar Anthony Parker, Community Development Officer at Dementia Australia, Dementia Advocate Russell Martin and Amy Rake from Tamworth Library talk about how we can all be involved in creating dementia-friendly and inclusive communities in collaboration with people living with dementia, their carers and families.

• Dementia-friendly communities: why we need them and how we can create them by Susan McFadden

  Publication Date: 2020

  Underpinning successful dementia-friendly communities is an awareness of people with dementia as active citizens and the importance of supporting engagement in community life. This book offers an overview of the dementia-friendly communities movement, showing the many benefits of this approach. This compassionate book tells another story about dementia, away from negative stereotypes. This alternative approach claims people can retain a sense of dignity, hold onto hope, sustain meaningful relationships, and live with a sense of purpose with support from their communities.
• Towards A Dementia-Inclusive Society: WHO Toolkit For Dementia-Friendly Initiatives by WHO

  Publication Date: 2021

  Towards a dementia-inclusive society: WHO toolkit for dementia-friendly initiatives supports individuals, communities and countries in raising awareness of, and empowering people living with, dementia to remain in, and be a significant part of, their community. The toolkit provides practical guidance and tools that can support efforts, including planning and implementation activities, to create dementia-inclusive societies.
• Dementia and Place: practices, experiences and connections by Richard Ward (editor) and others

  Publication Date: 2021

  Giving voice to the lived experiences of people with dementia across the globe, including Australia, Canada, Sweden and the UK, this critical and evidence-based collection engages with the reality of life for people living with dementia at home and within their neighbourhoods. This insightful text addresses the fundamental social aspects of environment, including place attachment, belonging and connectivity. The chapters reveal the potential, and expose the challenges, for practitioners and researchers as dementia care shifts to a neighbourhood setting. The unique ‘person-in-place’ perspective provides an innovative guide for policy and practice and calls for a new place-based culture of care and support in the neighbourhood.
• What I wish people knew about dementia by Wendy Mitchell

  Publication Date: 2022

  When Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with young-onset dementia at the age of fifty-eight, her brain was overwhelmed with images of the last stages of the disease - those familiar tropes, shortcuts and clichés that we are fed by the media, or even our own health professionals. But her diagnosis far from represented the end of her life. Instead, it was the start of a very different one. Wise, practical and life affirming, What I Wish People Knew About Dementia combines anecdotes, research and Wendy Mitchell's own brilliant wit and wisdom to tell readers exactly what she wishes they knew about dementia.
• People with Dementia Speak Out by Lucy Whitman (Editor); Graham Stokes (Afterword by)

  Publication Date: 2015

  In People with Dementia Speak Out, twenty-three people from diverse backgrounds share their experiences of living with dementia. The contributors are honest about the frustrations and fears they face, but overall there is remarkably little self-pity and a great deal of optimism. The personal accounts demonstrate that with the right support at the right time, and above all with opportunities to continue to contribute to society in a meaningful way, it is possible to live well with dementia.
• Staying in Life by Verena Rothe; Gabriele Kreutzner; Reimer Gronemeyer

  Publication Date: 2017

  Committed individuals from politics, art, churches, and social and volunteer work are creatively working towards dementia-friendly communities. In this book, three authors intimately familiar with the topic explore initial movements, obstacles, and first attempts.
• Creating Empowering Environments for People with Dementia Addressing Inclusive Design from Homes to Cities

  Publication Date: 2024

  This edited volume addresses the environments that exacerbate, exclude, and stigmatise those living with dementia to explore designs and processes that can optimise well-being and independence.
  Featuring the voices and opinions of people with dementia, the chapters showcase individual homes, special dementia facilities, different forms of care homes, and public spaces, from landscape to urbanism, as examples of how to meet the needs and preferences for those living with dementia now.
• Making it dementia friendly guidebook by Dennis Frost

  Publication Date: 2018

  A guidebook that is built from the perspective of the Person Living with Dementia. What this guide hopes to offer is the results of thorough quantitative research interpreted in the light of the lived experience. The guidebook provides a practical tool for making your venue dementia friendly.

• Defining dementia friendly initiatives Presenting a global evidence base for dementia friendly initiatives (2020)

  World Dementia Council paper 1
  The belief that people with dementia should be able to participate in the community, and a recognition that social isolation is bad for an individual’s health, has helped drive the momentum of the dementia friendly movement. As set out in the first part of this paper, at the 2013 G8 dementia summit the international community recognized the importance of people with dementia living well in the community. Over the past decade, there has been growing international discussion around whether there is a gap between the activity of ‘dementia friendly initiatives’, and the evidence underpinning their impact. The second part of this paper considers what these initiatives are seeking to achieve, and suggests that increasing awareness (overwhelmingly the main focus of activities, especially volunteer-led ones), enabling participation in the community, and providing support, are primary aims.
• Impacts of dementia friendly initiatives Presenting a global evidence base for dementia friendly initiatives (2020)

  World Dementia Council paper 2
  This is the second paper published in a series presenting a global evidence base for dementia friendly initiatives. The review of evidence highlighted in the first paper identified the huge variety of initiatives being delivered. The first paper argued that, despite this undoubted variation, initiatives sought to deliver three broad ambitions: raise awareness, enable participation and provide support.This paper will reflect on the evidence the review identified for the impact on people with dementia and their caregivers.
• A survey of the experience of living with dementia in a dementia-friendly community. (2020)

  Dementia-friendly communities (DFCs) are one way in which people living with dementia can be supported to be active, engaged and valued citizens. Quantitative evaluations of the experiences of those with dementia living within these communities are scarce. This article reports findings from a survey of people living with dementia on their experience of living in a DFC.
  Darlington, N., Arthur, A., Woodward, M., Buckner, S., Killett, A., Lafortune, L., Mathie, E., Mayrhofer, A., Thurman, J., & Goodman, C. (2020). A survey of the experience of living with dementia in a dementia-friendly community. Dementia.
• Involvement of people with dementia in raising awareness and changing attitudes in a dementia friendly community pilot project. (2019)

  Low levels of public understanding can contribute to the fear, stigma and social exclusion associated with living with dementia. Dementia friendly communities aim to address this by empowering people with dementia and increasing their social inclusion. As a part of a Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) process, a multicomponent dementia friendly community intervention supported: research; the establishment of a Dementia Advisory Group and Alliance; an awareness campaign and education in community organisations.
  Phillipson, L., Hall, D., Cridland, E., Fleming, R., Brennan-Horley, C., Guggisberg, N., … Hasan, H. (2019). Involvement of people with dementia in raising awareness and changing attitudes in a dementia friendly community pilot project. Dementia, 18(7–8), 2679–2694.
• Making a university community more dementia friendly through participation in an intergenerational choir. (2019)

  This study presents data from four cohorts of undergraduate college students and people with dementia and their family members, using an intergenerational choir as the process through which to begin to create a dementia friendly community. This was accomplished by breaking down the stereotypes and misunderstandings that young adults have about people with dementia, thus allowing their commonalities and the strengths of the people living with dementia to become more visible.
  Harris, P. B., & Caporella, C. A. (2019). Making a university community more dementia friendly through participation in an intergenerational choir. Dementia, 18(7–8), 2556–2575.

• Design, Dignity, Dementia: Dementia-related design and the built environment

  Publication Date: 2020

  The World Alzheimer Report 2020, ‘Design, dignity, dementia: Dementia-related design and the built environment’, is a global perspective of dementia-related design that takes a cross cultural approach, reflects regional and economic differences in low-, middle- and high-income countries, and considers urban versus rural settings. It highlights the role of innovation, entrepreneurship and the importance of aesthetics.
  It also looks to benchmark against progress made in the physical disabilities movement and demands the same progress is now made in design solutions for people living with dementia. The report calls for design solutions to be included in national governments’ responses to dementia, including in their national plans, recognising design as a vital, non-pharmacological intervention.

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  Words and Images to Use in Dementia and Caregiving (2022)

  Developed by the GBHI Dementia Community – Research Advisory Panel (DC-RAP). With the support of the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI), based at the University of California, San Francisco and Trinity College Dublin, the DC-RAP is a group of volunteers representing people living with dementia, family caregivers, and people at varying risk of dementia who provide their voice and experiences in the development of programs and research targeting aging and dementia.