A group of businesspeople from Okehampton are helping the town to become more aware of the needs of people with dementia.

Okehampton Rotary Club has undergone training and talk by Tavistock Dementia Alliance to learn more about how to recognise the signs of the many types of dementia among their clients and in their everyday life.

There is an ambition in the town, led by the Community Links SW carers group, to ensure the town centre is as friendly as possible to anyone experiencing dementia and their carers, friends and families.

Chris Bourne, Okehampton Rotary Club president, said: “Most of us, especially with our high average age, know someone with dementia. So, along with the Community Links ambition to increase knowledge of the needs of people experiencing and dealing with others with dementia, we thought it very important as part of the business community, that we do our bit to increase our awareness and help our clients and their carers.

“So, we invited Tavistock Dementia Alliance to talk to us. We quickly learned how easy it is to misdiagnose and either think some has the symptoms when they don’t and miss symptoms. We are now more aware of when our clients might need extra support and what we can do to help them.

“We learned how short-term memory loss is a symptom and there’s a difference between that and embedded memory. People with dementia often don’t know or acknowledge they have a problem, so that will influence how we can help them, and they can’t deal with change very well. Therefore, their more recent experiences can be disproportionately influenced by bad memories.

“For instance, if we try and help older people by buying an electric kettle to replace their hob kettle to keep them safe, they might treat it as a hob kettle and put it on the cooker top and cause a fire. They won’t know why you’ve given them the kettle and we now know to give them a kettle with an electric cut-off they can use on the cooker.

Amanda Bowen, Tavistock dementia coordinator, said: “Because public understanding is so poor and we don’t openly talk about it, people with dementia often feel – and are – misunderstood, marginalised and isolated. And that means that they’re less likely to be able to live independently in their own communities.”

The Dementia Friends initiative was developed by the Alzheimer’s Society to find out how dementia affects a person and doing small everyday things that can help. We aim to create a climate of kindness and understanding, so that everyone affected by dementia feels part of, not apart from, society.

People with dementia and their carers in the Tavistock area want a community that supports them to live independently, carry on doing everyday things they have always done and to feel they are still included, valued, understood, appreciated and belong to their community

Amanda Bowen, Tavistock dementia coordinator can be contacted on 07716 849839 or [email protected]. The group can be found at www.tavistockdementia.org and supported here https://membership.coop.co.uk/causes/76142