A psychologically informed model for supporting meaningful involvement of people living with dementia facilitated by undergraduate psychology students

Abstract

The East Kent Forget Me Nots is a service user involvement group, which is run by and for people living with dementia, with the support of the local Trust: Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust (KMPT). The group began as an extension of the Trust’s Dementia Service User Envoy position, held by Keith Oliver. As involvement opportunities began to exceed the capacity of a single person, this necessitated the formation of a small group of people living with dementia, among whom the workload could be shared (Asquith, Guss & Oliver, 2013). By the time the Forget Me Nots reached their second anniversary in November 2014, the group comprised more than 20 people living with dementia, and had made a significant impact in the field of dementia care and social policy.The group has advised on alterations to the Mental Capacity Act (2005) (DEEP, 2013), on clinical guidance papers (Guss et al., 2014a) and service user oriented materials (Guss et al., 2014b). This has ensured that the voices of people living with dementia have not gone unheeded, both locally within the Trust and the community, and nationally. Members of the group regularly speak at conferences about the subjective experience of dementia, and advocate for the needs of those living with the condition. Other projects, such asWelcome to Our World: A collection of life writing by people living with dementia(Forget Me Nots, 2014), have also been completed by the group, challenging pre-existing ideas about dementia in the community and providing new and enjoyable experiences for group members.This article will describe in detail the aims and modus operandi of the group, and how the working of the group is facilitated by undergraduate psychology students from the University of Kent. This article comes from the perspective of those students.