Do you know what Yoga is?

Tania Plahay is a yoga teacher and author of Yoga for Dementia: A Guide for People with Dementia, Their Families and Caregivers. Tania is passionate about bringing yoga to a wider audience and adapting the practices of yoga for those living with Dementia. Prior to writing her book Tania ran the FoNS project Yoga for Dementia, in a residential home in Thamesmead London. Tania divides her time between the Costa Blanca, Spain and the UK, where she runs yoga classes, retreats, workshops and training.

There has been a huge growth in the number of yoga practitioners in the UK and US in recent years. With this growth the image of lithe young yoga practitioners has spread around the globe, and has been used to sell products from cars to Tic Tacs.  Therefore, you would be forgiven if you thought that yoga was only for younger, fit women and that it mainly consisted of bending your body into pretzel like poses. However the practice of yoga goes far beyond the physical poses (known as asanas), and yoga can be attainable by all.

Love makes the world go round but sex adds the sparkles: A review of “Dementia, Sex and Wellbeing”

Uruakanwa Ekwegh is a Specialty Doctor in Medicine for older people, with an interest in acute frailty and medical education. Her Twitter handle is @Kanwa10

Before I started to read this book, I asked myself, “what do you think of when you hear ‘dementia and sex’?” Two phrases leapt to my mind: “inappropriate behaviour” and “safeguarding issues”. The author acknowledges this perspective when she states that in this group of people, the issue of sex is only raised in the context of problems or concerns. She pointedly asks, “Why would we choose to ignore sex when so many adults consider it to be one of their activities of daily living?” Sex as an ADL? What a novel idea!

While reading this book, I was drawn into her conversational style of writing. She cleverly navigates the line between “stuffy” and “fluffy”. Just as I would start getting bogged down with the academic stuff, she would bring in a practical or true life example to liven things up again. And she expertly uses her words to paint the pictures of the people in her examples; you are present and witness the conversations that she references.

Book review: Visiting the Memory Café and other Dementia Care Activities

Matthew Berrisford is a Charge Nurse at The Meadows Community Hospital, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust. In this blog post he reviews the recently published book: Visiting the Memory Cafe and Other Dementia Care Activities. He tweets @berrisfjord

Caroline Baker follows her previous publication, Developing Excellent Care for People Living with Dementia in Care Homes, with another informative and practical guide to asset-based and person-centred care.

Visiting the Memory Cafe and Other Dementia Care Activities has been developed by Baker and her colleagues at Barchester Healthcare as a framework for planning and implementing programmes of activity that optimise the wellbeing of people living with dementia.

The framework encompasses seven domains of wellbeing – identity, connectedness, security, autonomy, meaning, growth and joy – and aligns these with evidence-based activities that can be tailored to individual ability, history, and preference.

Book review: ‘Memory’s last Breath’ – a written exploration of life, love and personhood

Rachel Manners is a speciality doctor in hospital based complex continuing care in Edinburgh.  She is a particular interest in end of life care and in complex dementia care.  Her twitter handle is @RachelMannes1 (due to an unfortunate spelling incident that she cannot figure out how to fix!).

Journeying beyond questions of how and why disease happen; to considering what they truly mean in the lives of individuals is one of the great challenges of clinical practice. Dementia brings out this challenge particularly strongly given the questions it raises about not only what it means to think and remember, but what it means to be.  That is it to say, it forces the practitioner to consider what it truly means to be a person. For those of us who work with and for those who live with dementia (or experience it in our personal lives) these are important questions. My own practice in recent years has led me to wonder not only what I have to offer people with dementia, but also to begin to consider what they have to teach and offer me .

Thinking about these ideas, I came to the book  ‘Memory’s last breath:  field notes on my dementia’ to help me develop my understanding. This is the autoethnographic study of Gerda Saunders’ journey with and into dementia.

Book Review: Please tell me…

Liz Charalambous is a nurse and PhD student. She tweets @lizcharalambou and is a regular guest blogger for the BGS. Here she reviews ‘Please tell me…’ by Julia Jones and Claudia Myatt.

Without a doubt, one of the most important documents in older person care is the Alzheimer’s Society This is me support tool. It enables carers to access information with which to provide holistic care and is underpinned by a social model of care rather than a medical model, so important in today’s world of fast paced, pressurised, and increasingly politicised healthcare services. It places the person in the centre of care, ensuring their likes, dislikes, and preferences are recorded for the whole team to access.

Indeed, a favourite teaching strategy when introducing new students to dementia care is to provide them with two copies of ‘this is me’ and ask them to take them home for their partners or significant others to complete in the manner of ‘Mr and Mrs’ style 1970s TV programme. I have heard many stories of students returning the next day reporting back to the group that their other half had failed hopelessly in filling in the form, prompting them to realise the precariousness of ensuring person centred care in such instances.

Book review: The Geriatrician in Court

Dr Shane O’Hanlon is a consultant geriatrician and Honorary Secretary of the BGS. He holds a law degree and has a special interest in medicolegal matters. He tweets @drohanlon

Most doctors spend their career hoping never to see the inside of a courtroom! While geriatricians are probably among the most rarely sued specialists, we can still have quite frequent involvement with the law – the Coroner’s Court is a good example. There is also an increasing amount of medicolegal work related to dementia, deprivation of liberty safeguards and mental capacity. In this environment there has been a gap in the market for a book that focuses specifically on our needs, but retired geriatrician Dr Geoffrey Phillips is at hand with help.

“The Geriatrician in Court” is a handbook of “how to do it” based upon his thirty years of experience in preparing medico-legal reports and attending court to give expert evidence. The book covers all the main topics over the course of 226 pages. It begins with an outline of the legal system, criminal versus civil law, negligence and burden of proof. Important areas such as mental capacity, testamentary capacity, abuse, medical error and resuscitation all feature.

Reflections on ‘NOT Forgotten Lives: Felixstowe 2017’

Liz Charalambous is a nurse and PhD student. She tweets at @lizcharalambou and is a regular guest blogger for the BGS. Here she reviews ‘NOT Forgotten Lives: Felixstowe 2017’ edited by Julia Jones and Bertie Wheen

‘NOT Forgotten Lives’ is a written record, produced for the 2017 Felixstowe Book Festival, which celebrates the lives of older people living locally in residential accommodation. This slim volume is organised by an overview of what life story work is about, followed by photographs and accounts of the life stories of residents living in nursing and residential accommodation in Felixstowe. It concludes with a personal reflection from the co-editor, Bertie Wheen.

Why is this book important?

In a world where dementia is on the increase there are political, economic, ethical and often personal reasons why society must wake up to the reality of the disease. Currently an estimated 50 million people worldwide live with dementia, with a forecast of 131.5 million by 2050.  In the UK there are 850,000 people living with the disease, estimated to increase to 2 million by 2050. These figures alone suggest that dementia is a disease which can no longer be ignored.

Can Geriatric Medicine be learnt through reading ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’?

Dr Amy Heskett is a Speciality Doctor working in a Community Geriatrics team within West Kent called the Home Treatment Service. This team works alongside paramedics, GPs and district nurses to prevent unnecessary hospital admissions for people with frailty, multiple comorbidities, caring responsibilities or as part of end of life care.  The home visits use bedside testing and a multi-disciplinary approach to provide management of many acute medical presentations in a home-setting.  The development of these holistic plans requires a creative approach and the experiences often generate tweets @mrsapea and blogs at communitydoctoramy.wordpress.com

I read Roald Dahl’s ‘George’s Marvelous Medicine’ to my children today and my son said, “You really love the Grandma in this don’t you Mum?”

It’s true!  It was one of my favourite books during my own childhood and I now spend a large amount of time perfecting the Grandma’s voice for my children and absorbing the story with them as they snuggle on the sofa.  There is personal meaning to some of the pictures too and so a picture of George stirring the giant saucepan is hung on our kitchen wall.  The text describes ‘A rich blue smoke, the colour of peacocks’, at which point we cheer because Peacock is our family name.

‘Beloved old age and what to do about it’ A review for Julia Jones

Liz Charalambous is a qualified nurse on a female, acute medical HCOP (Health Care for Older People) ward at Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham University Hospital Trust. She tweets at @lizcharalambou and is a regular guest blogger for the BGS.

Margery Allingham

Beloved old age is a fitting tribute to Margery Allingham, author of detective fiction (including most notably that of Albert Campion, later converted to a TV series). Published on the 50th anniversary of Allingham’s death, and illustrated with black and white photographs from both eras, the book is a work of two parts. It contains the accounts of caring for older relatives, seamlessly interposed between each era to span over half a century. Allingham’s previously unpublished work, ‘The Relay’, describes her experiences of caring for three elderly relatives more than fifty years ago. The account is brought to life by Julia Jones as she picks up the baton and continues the story with her experiences of being a carer for her mother with dementia, to present the story of ‘Beloved old age and what to do about it’.

Book Review: Essential geriatrics (Third Edition) by Henry Woodford

Shane O’Hanlon is a geriatrician in Reading, and Digital Media Editor & Honorary Deputy Secretary at the British Geriatrics Society. He tweets @drohanlon

As a trainee I often dreamed of a single book that would cover everything a geriatrician needed to know! In reality, I had to consult a wide variety of volumes depending on my question so my shelf was weighed down with Lecture Notes, Case Histories, Law & Ethics, Physiology, Cardiology, etc.

The first edition of Essential Geriatrics was published during my training, but somehow didn’t register on my radar. That text has since been updated and revised, and now a third edition has just been published.