Rachael Litherland from Innovations in Dementia writes;
In January 2021 the UK was in a lockdown due to Covid restrictions. At the same time a team of people with dementia began work – to create a new resource to help newly diagnosed people with dementia identify their own goals and strategies.
The idea for this resource came out of some research about cognitive rehabilitation. Cognitive rehabilitation is a type of therapy that can make managing everyday activities easier for people in the earlier stages of dementia. It is often delivered via sessions with a therapist. Cognitive rehabilitation can help people to identify and achieve, in a step-by-step way, the goals that are important to them. You can watch a short animation that explains cognitive rehabilitation here:
Our job was to take some of these research ideas to create a resource that people recently diagnosed with dementia could use themselves.
This was no small task – we couldn’t meet face-to-face and we didn’t really know much about cognitive rehabilitation!
Nine people with dementia, Linda Clare and Ola Kudlicka from University of Exeter and Rachael Litherland from Innovations in Dementia worked together over eight months to talk, learn, share, translate, write and design. One of the advantages of lockdown was that we could include people from all over the UK and overseas. We quickly stopped talking about cognitive rehabilitation and began to talk about our wishes and desires –the things that bring joy to our lives and make our hearts sing.
“It is my life. It’s not your life. It’s my life. It’s the goals I want to set and the goals I want to achieve.” – Alison
You can find My Life, My Goals here:
There are also a number of really helpful films that explain more here:
My Life, My Goals | Innovations in Dementia
