Library Resources for People with Dementia

Staff from the Central Library engage in outreach work for elderly people suffering from dementia. At present the staff visit residents in sheltered housing complexes and care homes in the area. These visits are carried out on a weekly basis for the care homes and fortnightly for the sheltered housing complexes. They use a combination of resources to help stimulate discussion and aid recall and prompt memories.

These resources consist of packs, which we have specially designed to encourage interaction and introduce topics for discussion. The packs include photographs, reminiscences, articles, and adverts from newspapers, as well as reading materials about the subject. Staff have collated most of this information, using newspapers, photographs and other resources from the Local History Department. Information is then arranged into folders which staff can easily transport on their visits to the homes.

Staff also use passages from books which again have a local interest by authors such as Mae Stewart and Maureen Reynolds. Mae Stewart has also participated in a visit, with library staff, to a local care home and engaged in a session helping to stimulate conversation and interaction, by sharing her own reminiscences with the group. There are usually between five and twelve people in each group. The people attending these groups all have some form of dementia, ranging from mild to severe cases. When the clients are suffering from more advanced stages of dementia, staff recommend that groups are kept smaller, with a maximum of five peopeople attending.

Although the average age of people attending these sessions is 80-85 staff have found that the least popular topic for discussion is the Second World War. Many were just children, or teenagers, during this time and do not have many memories of that period other than home or school life. More popular topics are fashions of the 50's and 60's, Dundee Cinemas, Life in the Tenements and Dance Halls. More able groups enjoy finding out about Local History and staff have noticed that the groups enjoy amusing or anecdotal stories.

Staff leading these sessions have noted an increase in attention spans and interaction as the weeks progress, often people initially attending, who would not engage in the sessions are now becoming more communicative and conversant. These outcomes are not always immediately apparent, and are reached over a period of several weeks working with the group. Staff involved in this type of outreach work find this new aspect of their library work both rewarding and enjoyable, and staff research skills are employed to put together these resource folders, which can be reused by themselves, or lent to other staff who may, in the future, become involved in this type of innovative work.