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UNDERSTANDING DEMENTIA – A FILM for the SPECAL CHARITY

In the spring of 2007, Kate lost her mother and, without time to pause for thought, moved in to care for her eighty-two year old father, Jim, who had recently been diagnosed with a form of dementia, known as Lewy Body Disease.

Like other forms of dementia, Lewy Body presents similar to Alzheimer’s but patients, as in the case of Kate’s Dad, can also suffer from Parkinson’s like symptoms and hallucinations.

Discovering SPECAL

Feeling totally out of her depth and with a huge learning curve and limited support, a friend suggested Kate contact SPECAL (Specialized Early Care for Alzheimer’s) for help and guidance – not just with how to help Jim, but with how to survive as a carer. That friend’s suggestion could be said to have saved Kate’s life and provided her father with two final years of relative peace – something that seemed utterly impossible at the time his wife died.

What SPECAL offered was a way to understand dementia, to keep the lines of communication open between Kate and Jim and to offer them both contentment and sanity(!) even as the disease progressed.

After a year of caring for her Dad, SPECAL helped Kate work out a way to make the necessary move into a carefully chosen nursing home with the least disruption to his mental and physical well-being – a task that Kate would have said was impossible before encountering SPECAL. Thanks in large part to SPECAL, and despite his inevitable deterioration, he was able to regard the nursing home as home where he lived in relative peace for the last ten months of his life.

What we are doing

We realised what a difference SPECAL could make to so many people’s lives, if only they knew about them. And we wanted to show our gratitude in the most helpful way we could.

So, we promised we would help communicate their message by producing a number of informational and inspirational documentary-style films for training and promotion, where carers talk about their varied experiences and explain the benefits to carers of understanding and following SPECAL’s life enhancing, even life saving advice.

We know that many of you also have your own experience of dementia and Alzheimer’s, so you will know how important this is.

For information about SPECAL go to: http://www.specal.co.uk

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