Connect and Learn: Dementia in Transport
Connect and Learn – small changes means, life changing impact.
Community Transport Association were delighted to launch our new Connect and Learn sessions (previously known as Community Building Sessions) for members, with our first session on supporting people living with dementia to travel well.
The aim of these sessions is to bring together our members, the CTA team and wider partners to look at and discuss topics that are important to the way we operate, the way we support passengers and the way we enable each other to learn and share.
This session focused on looking at how we can support those living with dementia to travel for longer and why doing this is important to both the passenger and their carers. The focus of the first part of the session was on understanding why a person may struggle when they are living with dementia, understanding how drivers might best support communication with them and practical ways to distract people when they are travelling.
We know that all our operators want to keep people travelling with dementia as independent as possible for as long as possible and having tools to do so and the confidence to use them is key to achieving this.
CTA were joined by Kaitlyn Hughes, Community Transport Liaison Officer for the Carers Trust. Katie spoke about her experiences of working with CT operators and those living with dementia and emphaised why dementia friendly transport matters.
She shared that by supporting people to travel you reduce isolation, support carers, build trust , and give consistent access to social and medical activities. She spoke passionately about how building trust with a passenger and their families can change lives and create ways for people to feel secure in continuing to travel. By having a transport system that has a consistency of drivers, a calm environment, buddy system, clear communication and always staying person centred she was able to see people living with dementia thrive and keep the joy in their lives. She showed us that the small changes that we could make can have a big impact on the people we are supporting.
Although there are often challenges in supporting people with dementia, the wider group talked about the good practice that they have in their own organisations. It was interesting to hear how may of the operators present were supporting a significant number of people living with dementia and all wanted to create an environment that met their needs. In particular, one operator shared that they are looking at adapting a minibus so that it would be dementia friendly.
We would like to thank Katie for speaking to us and to all the operators that attended this session. You can find the link to the recording of it here. If you have any further questions then please do contact advice@ctauk.org