Dementia-Friendly Writing’s Post

Transcript

Hi, welcome back. So last week I did an Instagram live and I was answering some questions about dementia friendly writing and I thought I'd share some of the things that we talked about there in a few reels for anyone who wasn't able to come along who might be interested. So for today, this was an interesting question. How can caregivers make their written notes better, for example, when they write birthday cards or notes around the house? It's a great question because of course we all do this. We leave notes for our loved ones. We write birthday cards or special occasion cards. We may be right as short shopping list or a little reminder. So I think your first step here is to ask the person living with dementia what they find the easiest. And we all know that the way dementia affects people is very different from person to person. So just ask and that'll help you tailor what you do to the individual person you're writing for. Secondly, you can use many of the same principles that I talk about for other kinds of dementia friendly writing. So use space shortly a sentences and generally keep things visually clutter free. So let me give you a couple of examples and I'm going to use some real life examples from the people I support who are living with dementia. So that's firstly my mum who lives with quite advanced mixed dementia and also my husband who lives with young onset Alzheimer's disease. So let's take the birthday card example. And if I'm writing a birthday card for my mum, then I'm probably going to write something like this. Dear Mum. Have a. Fairy happy. Birthday. Lots of love. Heather. So I've kept it quite simple and I've left space, but you can see that with this one I've actually used my normal handwriting. My mum's dementia is quite advanced, but she actually taught me to to write cursive handwriting and she has no problem reading it at all. Now let's go to a different example, which is a short shopping list, and I often write this for my husband to pop out and get the things that we need. Now normally I'd scroll a shopping list like this. Broccoli. Right. Eggs. Milk. And it's going to end up looking something like that. My husband's however, is always found my writing a bit indecipherable. So what I've now started doing for him. Is something a little bit more like this? Broccoli. Bread. Eggs. Milk coop can't spell milk. So I'm distinguishing it by using bullet points. I'm leaving space again, I'm printing instead of handwriting, and if I do it like this, it's absolutely fine. So I hope this gives you some ideas, but as I say, talk to the person you're supporting and maybe experiment with a few ideas together to find a solution that works for you both. Don't forget to come back next week for another tip. I'll see you soon, bye for now.