Mind Visits 21 October-4 November Deventer, NL, and 4-18 November 2019 Nottingham, UK

Now rapidly drawing to a close, this was the last secondment of the MinD project in the Netherlands while there will be a further secondment in the UK in January. In both secondments, colleagues focused on collating, publishing and sharing results. 

In the Netherlands, Kristina from Manchester Metropolitan University focused on completing a chapter reporting on the ‘Let’s meet up!’ system and its development through involvement of groups of experts with lived experience in the UK and Spain for a forthcoming book on design, assistive technology and dementia edited by Gail Kenning and Rens Braenkert. In discussion with Ingeborg from Panton Design, she revised a toolkit to help designers to understand and envision people with dementia and their lives. The toolkit will be available on the project website when it is completed in February 2020. She also revised a journal paper on the use of design to embed mindfulness in people’s lives to support people with dementia with wellbeing, self-empowerment and social engagement. 

In the UK, Rosa and Yolanda from Intras, Spain, were hosted by Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation, Institute of Mental Health. They worked on completing a journal paper on the data collection with people with dementia and carers in the first half of this project. They also started on a journal paper for reporting the results of the evaluation of the Good Life Kit ‘This is Me’ part, which is a board game to engender social interaction and self-empowerment. During the second week, also a former MinD colleague joined the team for a day. Dr Isabelle Tournier, who now works at the Info-Demenz Centre, Luxembourg, visited to give a presentation about the work of the Centre, which was met with great interest by colleagues from the MinD project and from Nottinghamshire healthcare Trust and Nottingham University.