The fourth and final scheduled secondment to Luxembourg took place during May. The Luxembourg secondments have often been about taking stock, writing and planning. This meeting has followed on in that vein. During an extended fortnight, 13 people participated, including five colleagues from Alzheimer Europe.
Two of our group, Vjera Holthoff and Rosa Almeida, gave presentations to public meetings organised by Info-Zenter Demenz. These seem to have been well attended and well received.
One major task has been completing the MInD Dementia Design Guidelines, relevant for a designer readership and anyone intending to hold co-production workshops.
Alongside, we have drafted a set of policy recommendations. Owen Miller, Alzheimer Europe’s (relatively) newly-appointed policy officer joined us to discuss writing policy guidelines. These are still being circulated for comment, and later consultation. The intended audiences are policymakers, educators, designers, design regulators and voluntary organisations concerned with older people’s issues and dementia.
Half of our group were working on publications of the phase 1 data collection and on more recent data from the evaluation of the Good Life Kit. We shared a presentation by Vjera Holthoff and Rosa Almeida about the baseline findings from interviews with people with dementia. The four themes identified from the data were quite positive, for example about feeling empowered and reporting how people adapted to life after a diagnosis of dementia.
Alongside, preparations for the international MinD conference, 19-20 September 2019 in Dresden are in progress. The full programme is now available with three keynote speakers (design, health professions and lived experience speaker), and a variety of papers, design proposals and workshop sessions by a wide range of international presenters. Further details are available on the conference website: www.mind4dementia.eu
We thank our hosts at the University of Luxembourg and Alzheimer Europe. The facilities have been excellent for working in and the catering was great. Luxembourg is amazingly green at this time of year.
