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.

Fostering attachment in dementia care

Matthew Berrisford is a Charge Nurse at The Meadows Community Hospital, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust. He tweets @berrisfjord

One of the most useful pieces of advice I can share with a colleague working in dementia care is this: whenever confronted with what you perceive to be attention­-seeking behaviour, reframe it to yourself as attachment-seeking behaviour.

Attachment is a hard-wired evolutionary mechanism in all mammals. Simply put, in order to survive, infants must imprint upon a main carer (typically one or both parents) to ensure that their essential needs are met.

These needs are not purely physical (food, drink, protection); the relationship itself is essential. This fact is aptly demonstrated by animal experiments (Harlow’s monkeys and Skinner’s rats, for example) which consistently show that infant mammals raised in isolation – with no access to a main carer to imprint upon – age quickly and die younger.