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Past project archive

1998-9 A Dementia Care project “Remembering Yesterday, Caring Today”

RYCT BelgiumPartners in ten countries participated in an 18-week pilot programme introducing family carers of people with dementia to the essentials of positive dementia care and the use of reminiscence to promote and maintain communication. The people with dementia in every participating family across the 16 cities involved were actively involved in a series of structured activity-based reminiscence sessions. Emphasis was on multi-sensory stimulation and creative involvement through music, dance, drama, drawing and other forms of social and creative interaction. [Image: RYCT in Belgium].

Young and Old from Hildesheim play end of the war memoriesFor this work, the Network instigated an intensive training programme for all partners in London, followed by the setting up of pilot groups of families in each country under the leadership of project workers with a mixture of skills and experience. [Image: European partners training together before the national projects start].

An extremely thorough-going evaluation was carried out by four outstanding academics from Ulster (Faith Gibson) Bradford (Errollyn Bruce) Kassel (Birgit Jansen) and Berlin (Marianne Heinemann-Knoch) and this was published at the project's conference in Vienna in 1998.

Variations on the project are now running in many European countries, and the partners on this project continue to meet up and share progress. [Image below: A lively presentation by Belgian partners at the RYCT Vienna conference].

A lively presentation by Belgian partners at the RYCT Vienna conference


Further research based on this project has now been funded by the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom and other senior academic bodies in other EU countries. Click here for a summary of the project kindly supplied by Professor Bob Woods [PDF file 47k - requires Adobe Acrobat Reader - download free copy]


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