Over the last few years, CSREC successfully ran the Dementia & Care in Our Communities project, funded by the Life Changes Trust. We studied and identified the nature and extent of challenges and barriers faced by ethnic minority individuals living with dementia, and their carers.
We produced an information toolkit (link here) that is simple to navigate to help you better understand dementia and highlight further useful resources.
We also made recommendations to major health and care service providers, which would inspire the much-needed change in the design and delivery of mainstream services to make them more accessible to people from ethnic minorities, improving the quality of life for people living with dementia and their carers.
With further funding from the Life Changes Trust, we are glad to be back with our Reversing Dementia Barriers project.
The project will focus on two main groups: those at high risk of dementia amongst ethnic minority (EM) groups and unpaid dementia carers across the Forth Valley.
We want to encourage EM people with dementia and their unpaid carers to overcome cultural and other barriers, improve the quality of their lives, and live independently for as long as possible by accessing the help and support that is available and appropriate for their needs.
Target beneficiaries – Individuals from EM communities who have got, or look after someone with any of the following underlying health conditions:
We will run workshops and informal sessions to raise awareness about dementia risk factors and how we can reduce their risk of having dementia (Dementia Prevention).
These sessions will help participants identify their own risk factors, inform them how this puts them at higher risk for dementia, and recommend some hints and tips that could help them reduce these risk factors.
We will also recruit volunteer Community Champions from EM backgrounds (old and young) to help improve understanding about dementia and enable them to support people with dementia from their respective communities.
Community Champions will be provided with training by CSREC in the first instance. This will help identify individuals with dementia and people at-risk groups for developing dementia. They will then be offered professional Train-the-Trainer sessions by Age Scotland, to enable them to deliver some basic dementia training for individuals within their own communities.
Eman Hani
