A Family Guide to Living Well with Dementia

Gain the knowledge and insight you need to support your loved one with dementia to live life as they wish.

When a family member is diagnosed with dementia it’s difficult to know what to do. Do you worry you don’t have the skills and knowledge to support them? And what about looking after your own mental health?

A Family Guide to Living Well with Dementia is here to help. Written by someone with lots of experience in this field, it gives you the knowledge and insight to be able to support the person with dementia to live life as they wish. This easy-to-follow and accessible guide contains information that is intended to support people to plan for how they want to live their life, receive their care, and for end-of-life planning.

In this book you will find:

• Details of the different types of dementia and the dementia journey
• Explanations of the various Person Centred approaches to dementia care
• Information about people's rights within the health and social care legislation
• Insights into behaviour and methods of communication
• Support options available to you and your loved one, paid and community-based.

Often people who have been diagnosed with dementia and their families report feeling lost and not sure what to do apart from learning to adapt and find a way to do their best in what can often be difficult circumstances. This book provides easy, engaging, and practical content for things to consider and conversations to have so as to be able to provide the best care and support on a basis of sound understanding from everyone involved.

Ch 1 An Introduction to Personalisation

Ch 2 Personalisation: What Does it Mean for People Living with Dementia?

Ch 3 The Dementia Journey

Ch 4 A Toolkit to Develop Skills and Approaches to Achieve Personalised Support in Dementia Care

Ch 5 Effective Communication Tools and Approaches to Use to Support People Living with Dementia

Ch 6 Personalisation During Times of Changing Behaviour

Ch 7 Developing and Embedding Person Centred Cultures 

With a degree in journalism, Jayna Patel enjoyed using her investigation skills to help Liz create a practical and valuable resource for informal carers supporting someone living with dementia. As a Content Writer for health and wellbeing app, Evergreen Life, she understood the importance of balancing the need for the book to be thoroughly researched, with the requirement for it to written accessibly. Jayna had more of a marketing background than a health and social care one, having previously worked as an account manager at a web design and digital marketing agency for six years, meaning she was ideally placed to ensure the content was conveyed in an easy-to follow, jargon-free way – as well as tidy up all the references!

Liz Leach Murphy has worked within Health and Social care for the past 25 years and within this time she has been committed to improving the experiences of those accessing the care and support they need, which  has involved working alongside people living with dementia and their families.  She has trained in and delivered Person Centred Planning and Support Brokerage which are both approaches to enable people to direct their own care and support in a manner that is rooted in community rather than services. Liz's work and passion led her to setting up Imagineer Development UK CIC in 2010, a social enterprise based in the North of England with a national reach which specialises in Self-Direction.