Launching the ‘Make Shrewsbury Dementia Friendly’ Campaign

Radfield Home Care is proud to be launching a campaign to ‘Make Shrewsbury a Dementia Friendly Town’.

This is a subject that we feel very passionately about as it is so important to enable people to live for as long as possible within their own community and to create a supportive environment which allows them to contribute to society.

We have been working closely with the Shropshire Dementia Action Alliance  who are working hard all over Shropshire to promote the Dementia Friendly Communities programme and raise awareness of dementia amongst the general population.

In 2012 David Cameron announced his challenge on dementia  and the commitment that by 2015 up to 20 towns, cities or villages would have signed up to become dementia friendly communities. In actual fact, the country has taken the dementia challenge to heart and there are already over 80 communities signed up!

Running alongside the dementia friendly communities challenge is the Dementia friends campaign which has been run by the Alzheimer’s society and over 1 million people have become a dementia friend so far  www.dementiafriends.org.uk. Becoming a dementia friend is about knowing a little bit about dementia and how it affects people and the little things that you could do to help.

In our campaign to make Shrewsbury dementia friendly we will be visiting local businesses and other customer-facing organisations to provide them with some simple information on how they could ensure that they are being ‘dementia friendly’. It can be as simple as giving people a little more time or patience when they are sorting out their change in a shop or talking more clearly to someone who is struggling to understand you.