Dementia education goes to school

The Alzheimer’s Society is planning to reach out to black and minority ethnic schoolchildren in Tower Hamlets to raise awareness of dementia and help pupils learn more about the condition. The charity has won funding from Tower Hamlets Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to employ a South Asian Youth Engagement Dementia Support Worker to tackle this important task.

People from black and minority ethnic (BAME) communities make up 69% of Tower Hamlets’ population – and 32% of the population is from the Bangladeshi community. If the whole community is to learn more about dementia, there has to be targeted work with black and minority ethnic communities – from a young age.

Bill Gibbons, Alzheimer’s Society Services Manager for Tower Hamlets, said: “Our research shows that nearly one third of young people know someone with dementia. This is a shocking statistic and yet, despite this, there’s not been a great deal of work done in Tower Hamlets where we have more than 1,200 people living with the disease. It is vital that young people are getting the information they need in order to feel confident about the condition. It’s also important to remember that in Tower Hamlets the largest youth population is comprised of children from South Asian communities.”

John Gillespie from Tower Hamlets Council for Voluntary Service (THCVS), which administers the Innovation Bursary Scheme on behalf of the CCG, added: “… reaching out to schools is a really elegant way of getting positive health messages about dementia across to communities, and into older generations of families, where we know that there is not always good understanding of these conditions nor of the support available. We will be following Alzheimer’s Society’s work closely, as it offers a potentially great model for communicating health messages through the education system that could be usefully applied to other health conditions.”

The project will create an opportunity to break through the unique and often hierarchical structure of South Asian families by communicating an idea in English ready to be relayed in Sylheti, Urdu or whatever language is spoken in the home. Although the focus of the project will be on members of the BAME community, it will not exclude anyone.

Project Aims
The Alzheimer’s Society project aims to make the following five major changes in the Borough.

•Educate pupils and their teachers through Dementia Friends Sessions in Schools. Dementia Friends aims to give people an understanding of dementia and the small things that they can do that could make a difference to people living with dementia. From helping someone to find the right bus to spreading the word about dementia on social media, every action counts.
•Increase access to South Asian people with dementia through support work.
•Break through South Asian family hierarchies to educate people about dementia.
•Give schools accredited PSHE resources so that dementia is on the curriculum.
•Boost Tower Hamlets in its ambition to become a Dementia Friendly Community by creating a Dementia Friendly Generation in Tower Hamlets’ KS2 and KS3 children.

Project Worker
The Alzheimer’s Society will be employing a project worker for 21 hours per week on a nine month fixed term contract. For more information, contact the Alzheimer’s Society via:
www.alzheimers.org.uk

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