What if you could better understand the complex world of dementia and discover ways to connect with your loved ones affected by it? In today's episode we meet Shirley Pearce, the CEO and founder of Understanding Dementia. A retired occupational therapist, Shirley's compassion, personal commitment and years of experience have led to the creation of a unique programme that reshapes traditional care approaches by focusing on enhancing the emotional wellbeing of dementia patients.
We discuss the nature of dementia, its devastating effects and the tools offered by Shirley's programme to help for caregivers develop new skills. Shirley's valuable insights extend to real-life scenarios, like managing communication hurdles or finding strange items in the fridge, emphasising the importance of understanding human behaviour when caring for dementia patients. We also delve into her ABC programme, which is designed to minimise frustration and confusion for people with dementia and their families.
This episode is a journey through the often misunderstood landscape of dementia care, filled with hope, compassion, and practical guidance. Whether you're a family member, healthcare professional, or someone dealing with dementia, you're bound to find this conversation both enlightening and empowering. Join us as we shed light on the complex world of dementia and explore how hope can be found after a diagnosis.
What if you could better understand the complex world of dementia and discover ways to connect with your loved ones affected by it? In today's episode we meet Shirley Pearce, the CEO and founder of Understanding Dementia. A retired occupational therapist, Shirley's compassion, personal commitment and years of experience have led to the creation of a unique programme that reshapes traditional care approaches by focusing on enhancing the emotional wellbeing of dementia patients.
We discuss the nature of dementia, its devastating effects and the tools offered by Shirley's programme to help for caregivers develop new skills. Shirley's valuable insights extend to real-life scenarios, like managing communication hurdles or finding strange items in the fridge, emphasising the importance of understanding human behaviour when caring for dementia patients. We also delve into her ABC programme, which is designed to minimise frustration and confusion for people with dementia and their families.
This episode is a journey through the often misunderstood landscape of dementia care, filled with hope, compassion, and practical guidance. Whether you're a family member, healthcare professional, or someone dealing with dementia, you're bound to find this conversation both enlightening and empowering. Join us as we shed light on the complex world of dementia and explore how hope can be found after a diagnosis.
More than a million people in the UK are living with dementia. The effect on people's lives can be devastating, confusing and frustrating, but how best can we help people affected and their families? My guest today is a retired occupational therapist who set up a special programme to help people with dementia and their families. Today I'm in conversation with Shirley Pierce, the CEO and founder of Understanding Dementia. Thank you so much for joining me, shirley. First of all, what exactly is dementia?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Dementia is a progressive neurological disorder. Progressive means that it gets worse over time. Neurological means that it affects the nerves carrying messages to or from or within the brain. Disorder means that it's not part of normal ageing. It's something different.
ANGELA WALKER:
Now, so many of our lives will be touched by dementia and obviously we want to do everything that we can to help people who are affected. What is it that made you come up with this new programme Understanding Dementia?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
I had worked as an occupational therapist and before that as a student nurse and a care assistant, and I'd worked with a lot of people with dementia and I had been shocked at the lack of understanding among people, even professionals, even specialist professionals, and the way that people were treated when they had dementia and the way that they were talked about shocked me and I wanted to do something about it from way back, and I only recently had the opportunity to do that.
ANGELA WALKER:
So how does your programme differ from the way that people have traditionally been dealt with when they've got dementia?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Traditionally, it has been assumed that people with dementia are losing their intellect, that they can't converse in a normal way and that they are not really sensitive to what's going on around them and that it's not no big deal if they're not treated particularly well. More and more we're discovering that actually it's the reverse they're working more and more on feelings. Memory isn't storing the facts of what's happening, so much so they get more aware of feelings, so they become more sensitive to feelings, and so the way we treat them becomes even more important, not less important.
ANGELA WALKER:
So there's often this sort of sense of confusion for people who have dementia. It's almost like they can't seem to remember things properly. And what's happening in their brains at that time? And how does your programme help us to help them?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Right, I explain that for you and me, our brains are recording and storing the facts and the feelings of what's happening, so I have, as it were, a recording of all the facts leading up to this moment. I know why I'm sitting here having a conversation with you and I know why there's all this equipment around us. If I didn't have that information, it might be a bit disconcerting, at the very least. In dementia, more and more the facts are not being stored. They're being stored intermittently, and then less and less at this time goes on so that you can be living. I don't think that people with dementia live in the past. I think they live in the present. But whereas you and I make sense of the present by using the facts of the very recent past, people with dementia try and make sense of the present using whatever facts they have access to, which may be older facts or they may be irrelevant facts. So it's very much harder for them to make sense of what's going on.
ANGELA WALKER:
So are you saying that they're not really storing short term memories, they're not storing recent memories? Yeah, because we often hear this, don't we? That they've got an absolutely amazing memory of something that happened when they were like in their 20s, or holiday and a life event or something like that, but somebody might not remember that they've put the oven on or something. So how can we help people with these difficulties?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, first of all, by understanding that somebody who has a perfect call of that holiday when they were growing up. It's understandable to me because their memory was working so much better in those days, so the facts will be stored so much more clearly, and because they, if it was a happy memory, they might have referred back to it, and so the memory becomes really embedded over time so it's really accessible and easy for them to recall. Now, something like putting the oven on, something you do all the time and the memory of doing it this morning or yesterday or the day before can all merge in together. And when memory isn't storing the facts reliably, then that can all get muddled up or it can be not stored at all. The fact that you've just put the oven on may not have stored, and anything that hasn't been stored just isn't there. So it's not that so much that they don't remember is that it isn't there to be remembered. You can only remember something that's been stored in the first place.
ANGELA WALKER:
It's so interesting and, of course, it's really frustrating for the person who's got dementia, but it's also frustrating for the loved ones who are trying to help them. How can we help our loved ones who are going through this? I mean, what's the best way of almost like jogging their memory or helping them to be in the present?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, I don't actually try and do that even. I find that if you take the focus off trying to help them remember better and you concentrate on something else, which is their well-being, then you reduce the stress that they're under and the side effect of that is that all the processes within the brain work better when they're not under stress, because stress really interferes with memory storage and recall. So we concentrate on well-being, not in a kind of fluffy sense, but in a very specific sense. That was set out by psychologist Tom Kittwood years ago, who said that in order for us to experience well-being any of us we need four feelings. He described them as four global subjective states, but he meant feelings.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
So we need self-esteem, we need to know that it's okay to be me, we need a sense of agency or autonomy, a certain degree of choice and control, and we need a sense of social confidence. So we don't need to be the life and soul of the party, necessarily, but we need to be comfortable around other people. And we also need a sense of hope, and if any of one of those is under threat, then the others tend to crumble as well. They're a bit like four pillars holding up our well-being. So, as carers or supporters of somebody with dementia, we can be on the alert and we can be aware of those aspects of well-being, and if we can see one of them start to crumble, then we can do something about it before it gets to the point where people start talking about challenging behaviour, because I think if you get to that point, then somebody is under extreme stress.
ANGELA WALKER:
It's so interesting what you say about self-esteem. And if you're in a situation where you think, oh my goodness, I can't even believe that I've left my keys in the front door again. What's wrong with me? Why is this happening to me? That's frustrating and I can see how that would erode your self-esteem. And then if you have a relative who's trying to be helpful, going come on, mum, don't you remember? When we just came in, you're the one that opened the door. How did you leave the keys in the door? Blah, blah, blah. So what do you do in that situation if your loved one is the one who's left the keys in the door and you're trying to tell them that they've done it? Or how can you broach things with them without chipping away at their self-esteem and their confidence and so on?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, I think the key is in understanding what's going on, because once you realise that the fact of them leaving their key in the door probably didn't get stored, which is why they've done that If it was being stored, they wouldn't have made that mistake. So the fact that it hasn't been stored, once you understand that, then you're not going to be saying, come on, don't you remember? It's actually, don't you remember? Is very difficult thing to be asked, because clearly they haven't and that is bound to chip away at their self-esteem.
ANGELA WALKER:
And cause them to be frustrated and maybe a bit cross and angry. I mean, I would be. Yes, exactly. Let's talk about this sense of autonomy. I suppose people might be thinking well, how can I allow my dad to have autonomy when he might be doing things which could endanger him? So it's really like how do you get that balance between not kind of treating someone as a child and wrapping them in cotton wool and not letting them do anything in case they hurt themselves, and allowing them to go about their lives as best they can?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Yeah, well, all of these four feelings are feelings, they are senses. So you can engender a sense of autonomy by giving somebody a feeling of choice In a way that is different from the way you would do it for somebody who has full cognition, full command of their memory processes. I had an example at home. When we bought our house, we were given a choice of tiles for the bathroom. I didn't like any of them, but once I'd chosen one of them, well, it was your choice, but I didn't feel that I'd had a choice because I didn't like what I'd had to choose. And it's very easy for that kind of idea. We give somebody a choice, but actually sometimes it might be better if that choice wasn't available to them but we had given them a sense of some degree of choice and control, if that makes sense.
ANGELA WALKER:
Shirley, you mentioned this sense of hope. Dementia is progressive, isn't it? And I think people that are diagnosed and their families know that. The likelihood is this is as good as it gets, that they're probably going to progressively get worse. How can you instill a sense of hope in somebody who's got a degenerative condition like this?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
It depends what you mean by it's going to get worse. Their memory function may well get a lot worse, and is likely to over time, but their general well-being doesn't have to. That's the key. If we concentrate on well-being, then memory can do what memory does, and it doesn't necessarily feel like the end of the world. The important thing is our relationships, and I have had people come through our course who have said that their relationship with a person they're supporting is so much better because they're not constantly trying to make them remember and trying to point out their mistakes all the time. They are relating to them on a much more personal level and much more supportive level, and so, in a sense, things aren't getting better.
ANGELA WALKER:
Talk me through your programme. How does it work for, say, I was coming to take part in your programme. What's the kind of format?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, we have a course of eight weeks for family carers and most of our courses are on Zoom. We started doing lockdown and that was all we had available to us. We now deliver courses on behalf of Wokingham Borough Council and we do some face-to-face courses, because not everybody is comfortable online, not everybody has access to the internet, but it takes the same format whether it's face-to-face or online. So we have eight sessions of about an hour and hour and a quarter and we we have a presentation, a very short presentation, an introductory one, in the first session and then we take one aspect of dementia each time and then we discuss it and we have questions and answers and we have discussion and then the person taking part will take away some new way of thinking, a new skill to practice, and they can go away and during that week they learn more by putting it into practice and then they can come back, talk about how they get on and learn the next step and over the period of the course they tell me that their mindset is starting to change and they are looking at things differently and understanding things differently, because so many people talk about dementia as if it's a thing and it's not very nice and we've all got to be terribly patient. But I think that if you're relying on patients as a 24-7 carer, the more you rely on it, the thinner it wears and eventually it wears out a new snap. But if you're relying on understanding, then the more you understand, the stronger that gets and the better you're able to understand and the more effective your support will be.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
So the courses are really aimed at changing the mindset. It's like changing the autopilot. We automatically tend to correct people and point out their mistakes, because that's what you do in normal life. Somebody makes a mistake, you point it out and you correct them because they want to get better. But in dementia that can be quite destructive. So once people are used to working in a different way, then that different way starts to become more natural, and so their instincts are sort of getting retrained so that when they get into a difficult situation that maybe even we haven't discussed on the course, they're not having to think oh now, what did they say I'm supposed to do? When this happens, I have to say that, and when they say this, I say that, but they've just said something completely different. I don't know what to do, because that wasn't covered when they're thinking in this new way, then they are getting more tuned into the person's feelings and the best thing to do or say is starting to become more natural so they can operate on instinct.
ANGELA WALKER:
So can you share with us maybe some of the tools that you give people to go away with when they take part in one of your courses?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
We do a whole session on this whole business of wellbeing and then we start talking about the ways that we can help people, and there's a really simple ABC that we use as a guide, and the A is we avoid asking the person questions. If you're being quizzed, it kind of puts you on the spot, and if you can learn a way of not asking so many questions, then it makes it so much easier. Even a question like how are you? How many times have you asked somebody that and then, three quarters of an hour later, wish you hadn't asked, because they're still telling you. Or if somebody asks you and you're not sure why they're asking is this just a greeting? Are they wanting to know about some ongoing situation? If so, which one? My complicated love life or my that embarrassing medical problem? How much do they know already? How much do I want them to know All of that? If they can just say oh, how lovely to see you, you can save all of that.
ANGELA WALKER:
That's so interesting because it's a really automatic thing that we do all the time, isn't it? Oh, how are you? And sometimes we're not even really asking for any information, as you say. It's just like how are you? Yes, good, thanks. How are you? Yes, good. And on we go.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
It's like how do you do kind of thing? Yes, that's so interesting.
ANGELA WALKER:
Something that I know does happen is that sometimes a partner may have passed away and the person who's got dementia might not remember that that's happened. And for other relatives, how do they deal with that? Should they keep on saying, oh sorry, mom, don't you remember Dad died last year? Or how should people handle that?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, I have been in that situation where I was with somebody whose husband had died and she suddenly turned to me and said oh, where's Reg? I knew he died and I had been at his funeral, and so had she, and I thought this is interesting. How am I going to handle that? So I did what I do a lot of the time, which is to play for time, and I just said, oh, that's interesting, wonder where he is. And she suddenly said, oh, I know he'll be playing golf. And so I said, oh, yes, oh, it's a lovely day for it. Oh, my husband plays too.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
And then, suddenly, out of the blue, we talked about that for a minute or two and suddenly, out of the blue, she said, oh, I do miss him since he's died. Now, if I had said, oh, he's died, that would have thrown her into grief, but she was kind of processing it for herself, and so I just went along with that and I said, oh, you must have loved him. And then she surprised me again, because she burst into a huge smile and said, oh, yes, he was the best. So not only would I have thrown her into grief if I'd said he died, but if I'd even said oh no, he's out on the golf course when she had been thinking I wonder whether he's still with us. Has he died? How embarrassing not to know whether your own husband is alive or dead.
ANGELA WALKER:
She might have been upset with you, so why did you say that he was playing golf when you knew he's died? Gosh, it's a bit of a minefield, isn't it?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
It is a bit of a minefield and she would have been thinking is this some sort of conspiracy? Whereas I was not telling her. I was actually following along behind what she was saying. So in the conversation she was leading and I was following, and that's a much easier place to be.
ANGELA WALKER:
Let's look at another scenario, which is people putting things in weird places, the fridge, for example. What do you do if your loved one has put the remote control in the fridge? I'm just pulling this idea out of thin air. It happens. I mean, I've done it myself, you know, just out of tiredness. But if you have a relative who's got dementia and they are doing things like that, what do you do if you open the fridge and there's a pair of socks or something in there? Should you just take them out and just pretend that you never noticed? Or should you go oh, don't put them in there. Like, what should you do in that kind of scenario?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, I would come back to wellbeing. And it's not going to do the person any favours if you confront them with their mistake, because you're actually confronting them with evidence that their memory is not working and that's very, very painful. And if you do it in front of anybody else, then that's hideous because that's really embarrassing. If you're supporting their wellbeing, then it becomes less of an issue. And there's another charity I forget which one now that uses the phrase make it safe to forget. So if you make it okay these lapses and you don't draw attention to them, actually you're not making them more likely to happen again, because if you drive down somebody's self-esteem, then they are more likely to make those kinds of mistakes because they are under more stress.
ANGELA WALKER:
Now we've talked about how to deal with family members who've got dementia, but obviously people who've got dementia see a lot of medical professionals doctors. They might have to go into hospital for something that's completely unrelated. So say, they have a fall, they break their hip, they go into hospital. How can your training course help professional people who are dealing with people who've got dementia? They might not be dementia specialists themselves, it might just be that they have a patient who has got dementia. Is there something that they can learn from your course?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Yes, we do a separate course for health and care professionals, and dementia is so common that anybody working in health and social care is very likely to come across people with dementia, and they won't all have specialist training.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
One of the most interesting pieces of research that I have read was actually done on people who have gone into hospital, who happen to have dementia, but they've gone into something else, and it was looking at the phenomenon of refusal of care and why people suddenly will not go along with the care routine and they refuse it when somebody comes and tries to give them a wash and it causes all sorts of problems. But this was done by Dr K T Featherstone, who was not a clinician but she was a sociologist and she was looking at it from the point of view of normal human behavior. If you're in a confusing place and a complete stranger comes up to you and expects you to take your clothes off and starts doing intimate care well, hang on a minute. No, that's normal. And if you understand that and how vulnerable people feel and you understand about wellbeing, then you're going to handle those sort of situations very differently and you're going to start seeing the person more as a person and not as just a task to be done, and that makes a difference too.
ANGELA WALKER:
That makes perfect sense. But I guess you know, we know how under pressure hospitals are and if they're thinking I've got 10 elderly people on this ward, they all need washing, and to them it might be like, oh, why is Mrs Smith being so awkward, let's just get this done, kind of thing. It must be quite hard for the professionals even to take that space and think hang on a minute, I need to be a bit understanding here.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
I think you also need to look at the priorities.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Is having an all over wash every day the most important thing?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
That may be very controversial thing to say, but sometimes we need to look at the bigger picture and if somebody is in a state of wellbeing then they are more likely to go along with the request for a wash anyway. I stayed with a lady on one occasion I was doing live-in care and she desperately needed a wash. But she had assured me that the shower didn't work because she used to turn off all the lights at night and the shower isolated switch looked for all the world like a light switch, so that had got switched off too and she hadn't had a shower for months. And I had to deal with that in a different way and I said, oh, maybe we can have a little pumper session after breakfast and we can do each other's nails after our shower. And she had her shower because I was in my dressing gown, because I was living in, and she felt much less threatened by that and the fact that I was in my dressing gown made her more likely to concentrate on.
ANGELA WALKER:
So earlier on in the chat you mentioned about this ABC. Can you elaborate a bit more on that for us, Shirley?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Yes, we talked about the A, which is avoid asking questions, and that's not about just trying to avoid asking them, but finding alternatives.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
And then the B is being a buddy and really getting alongside a person and making a relationship in the moment with them, and that's much easier when there are just the two of you.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
When I was working with the lady I was staying with doing live-in care, I could be a buddy with her just the two of us very much more easily. But if somebody else came in at one point, district nurse arrived and if we had struck up a conversation the nurse and I had struck up a conversation it would have left the lady I was looking after out and, worse still, we could easily have found ourselves talking about her across her, and that's awful, that's not including her, that's talking across her, and it's very hard to cope with. So being a buddy is much easier when there are two of you, and so we talk about on the course ways to handle the situation where there's somebody else in the room, somebody else wanting to come into the conversation, and how you deal with that without causing the person any more problems and how do you deal with that then I mean say, for example, you have to take your loved one to the doctors.
ANGELA WALKER:
There's you, your mum, for example, and the doctor it's about mum's wellbeing. Mum's there. How do you deal with that? Because you could really easily slip into talking about mum with the doctor and that's quite infantilising, isn't it?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
For a start, I would try and eliminate any of the conversations that are going to cause too much of a problem. I could write to the doctor beforehand and give any of the information that he's likely to be asking me in the session, so that I'm not having to talk across the person unnecessarily. You can write. Sometimes you can ring and have a conversation beforehand. Sometimes you can have a quick five minutes before or after, maybe while the person is in the loo. If the only time you have with the professional is when the person's there, it can be extremely difficult and sometimes I have resorted to turning to the person. If the professional has asked something that I think is a bit out of order, I might turn to the person and I say, well, it was an odd thing for them to say just then, and so I'm being a body with them in that moment.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
And then they're not feeling ganged up again, exactly, exactly. If there's a gang, then it needs to be the person's gang. I need to be in their gang. I don't want to be ganging up with anybody else.
ANGELA WALKER:
It all makes sense. It all makes sense actually when you think it through. It does, it does. And what about the C in your ABC?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, the C is cut out contradiction. So if, in that scenario, we were talking about where the lady was talking about, her husband, if I had said no, no, no, no, don't you understand? He's died. That can be contradiction and most of that is completely unnecessary and it's destructive. So I had an example when I was visiting somebody who looked out at the garden and he said oh, there's been any rain out there. The garden's looking very dry. If it doesn't rain soon, we'll have to water the garden. Now it was winter. It was hard to tell from inside that it was winter, because it was nice and warm that part of the garden. There was nothing growing. Apparently Everything looked dead.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
In another part of the garden that you couldn't see from his window, there were the snow drops coming up, which would have given a clue to the time of year. So I had a choice of what I could say. I could have said no, no, no, it's winter, with a subtext of you silly old man, you don't even know what time of year it is. What I did say was well, I just heard there's going to be rain later on, so I think we're going to be all right Now. There was rain forecast and there had been quite a lot of rain recently and the more rain forecast was not really good news because there had been floods forecast. But I wasn't going to tell him that because he'd lived by the river and the idea of flooding would have been a really bad thing for him, really bad news. I needed to convey the sense of good news, the sense of hope. Really he didn't need to be contradicted, there was no point. So I just gave him an answer that felt like good news.
ANGELA WALKER:
What can we do in a situation like I know? We should avoid asking questions. If someone's got dementia that's something that you mentioned. What about things like giving a choice over a meal, or would you like tea or coffee? How can you go about those everyday conversations without upsetting somebody?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, the tea and coffee one is a very common one, and if somebody asks me if I want a cup of, if I want a drink at all, then I'm likely to think oh, crumbs, am I about to go on a journey? Do I know where the loo is? Have I just had a cup? All of those things will go through my mind in a split second. Have they made me a cup before, and was it any good? So I will come out with an answer without really thinking it through. But for somebody with dementia, there's just more to process and it takes longer.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
And halfway through that processing some of the information might slip away and even the question itself might slip away. And you're left with the sense that somebody's standing in front of you saying, well, do you? And you're thinking, if I admit that I don't know what it is that they've asked, are they going to think I wasn't listening and all of that. So I could instead say, oh, I think it's time for a drink, I fancy a coffee. And they are more likely than because the situation is relaxed, I'm not stressing them they're more likely to express a preference and say, oh, can you make my tea?
ANGELA WALKER:
When you talk about it like that, you make it sound so easy. But we just have to get in the mindset of thinking how can I ask this question without directly questioning someone in a way that might feel like you know they're being interrogated? Do you want tea or coffee? Do you want milk? Do you want sugar? Do you want cream? Do you want a biscuit with it? It could be for someone who's got memory issues like quite confrontational, oh my goodness. But we've talked about so much. Shirley, thank you. Now I know that you've developed a booklet to help people through this maze, through this mind field of helping someone understand dementia. Tell me a little bit about your booklet and how people can get hold of it.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
It's setting out this understanding of dementia in very simple terms so that anybody working in a dementia setting can pick it up very easily. Anybody who's working in the second language will find. It's not full of jargon, it's not full of acronyms, it's straightforward language. It's got some lovely cartoons.
ANGELA WALKER:
Yeah, the pictures are great because they illustrate the point in a fun way and that helps us to remember. Actually, do you want to talk us through one of the pictures? Maybe have you got a favourite.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
Well, the caption for this one is questions may not get the answers you need, and there's a lovely drawing of a young man asking his, his uncle have you heard the cat? And his uncle saying oh yes, I've done that. And then you can see the cat with a little thought bubble saying, oh no, he hasn't. And then there's a second one there may be better ways to find out. And then there's a little picture of the cat and the unopened tin of cat food.
ANGELA WALKER:
Well, that's a really lovely example of one of the things in your book which I've read and I found it so interesting and full of information, so that's going to be a real asset to anybody. So how could someone get hold of a copy of that if they wanted to?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
This book is being made available through our website. It's just £5 including UK postage.
ANGELA WALKER:
Perfect. And before we wrap up, I just want to say and how does it make you feel that you've come up with this course and you're helping people, surely, and that you're getting this feedback that it's changing people's lives in a positive way?
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
It's what I always wanted to do from the age of 18, when I had my very first job. While I was waiting for a place on a nursing course, I got a job in a care home as a care assistant and I thought I was so shocked by what I saw. I thought I must do something about this. And I was about to start nursing and I thought maybe I could specialise in older people eventually and do something that way. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do it, but I wasn't able to finish my course.
SHIRLEY PEARCE:
I injured my back and I had to leave the profession and I did something completely different for years. And then I came back into the health service as an occupational therapist years later and I found myself working with people with dementia. Because of the problems I'd had with my back, I couldn't work in the acute mental health or physical health sector, but I could work in the community with people with dementia and their families. So that suited me in that way and then I realised I was coming back to what I'd wanted to do all along and I learnt ways of working with people which were much more benign and much easier really than some of the conventional ways that really spurred me on to develop this Well, Shirley.
ANGELA WALKER:
Thank you so much for the work that you do to help people understand dementia and thank you very much for sharing with us today. Thank you very much. I'm journalist Angela Walker and today I've been in conversation with Shirley Pierce. I hope you've enjoyed the show. Please subscribe and share, and if you know someone who's inspirational or if there's a story that's under-reported that you think I should be covering, drop me a line through my website, AngelaWalkerReportscom. Until next time, take care.