Dementia Open Day

BME Health Matters and Rochdale and District Mind Dementia Open Day/Conference

A Dementia Open Day/Conference was held at Castlemere Community Centre on Thursday 29 May and throughout the day over 230 members of the public attended.

The main objective was to provide information and advice from dementia specialists and other health care professionals.

Organisations providing information included Rochdale & District Mind, Greater Manchester Police, Greater Manchester Fire Service, NHS IAPT Service, The Assistive Technology Team, Alzheimer’s Society, Stoke Association, The MERIT team, Colin Acquah from Kenny Webber and Circle.

Speakers were Tricia Hornby, Chief Executive of Rochdale MIND, Maqsood Ahmed from the NHS-SCN - who talked about the strategic importance of the work BME Health Matters are doing at a local level in order to shape policy at regional and national level; and Akhlak Rauf from the Bradford ‘Meri Yaadein’ project. Akhlak showcased the Meri Yaadein DVD which featured South Asian participants who are living with Dementia and he went on to outline the findings of their published report, ‘Exploring good practice on supporting South Asian carers through access to culturally competent service provision’.

One of the highlights of the event was a role play ‘Mein Pagal Nahin’ (I’m Not Crazy) enacted by three carers; one of whom was the BME Health Matters Project Consultant Shahid Mohammed - who also conceptualised the role-play.

Shahid commented: "It was really important that we somehow deliver a message to the South Asian community in 15 minutes on how people living with dementia and their families are affected by this disease. Often misunderstood, as there is no word for dementia in many South Asian languages, people with dementia or any other mental health problems are referred to as ‘Pagal’ (Crazy/Mad) and therefore there is still a huge stigma attached to condition. So other than delivering talks in community venues or speaking on radio shows, which I regularly do and will continue to do, I thought that having something visual and audible, something that the audience could understand and relate to and would guarantee an instant response. Our role play definitely did that. The uniqueness in our role play was that we talked in English and Punjabi at the same time."

Khalid Bashir from BME Health Matters said: "This year’s Open Day was bigger and better than last year and I feel through the work Shahid and myself are doing, we are beginning to make a difference in raising the awareness of dementia within Rochdale’s South Asian community. But we still have a lot of work to do and through our partnership work with colleagues like Mohammed Ali from Rochdale & District Mind, the Alzheimer’s Society and the Stroke Association we will make dementia an acceptable word and have truly dementia friendly communities. I would finally like to thank all the exhibitors, speakers and especially the people of Rochdale for supporting us and making the open day the success it was."