October 4 - BUDI - Helping people with dementia and their carers

Ostrich are happy to welcome a guest blog written by Anthea Innes about the Bournemouth University Dementia Institute (BUDI) and how their services and research are helping both people living with dementia as well as their carers.

What is BUDI?

Bournemouth University Dementia Institute (BUDI) is a cross-school initiative at Bournemouth University (BU). We are committed to the BU vision of fusion, which is when research, education and professional practice activities come together to address a societal need. Dementia is very much a societal need with the UK Prime Minister’s Dementia Challenge one indication of this. People with dementia and their families can become isolated from their families and aspects of everyday life. Dementia sufferers also require a significant amount of secure and bespoke care which can be difficult to acquire. One of our main goals at BUDI is increasing public understanding about dementia. This will then hopefully improve the lives of people living with dementia and also the lives of their carers. In this way we are working towards making a difference in one area that impacts on many people, those living with dementia and those who support those living with dementia.

What BUDI does?

BUDI is an intentional acronym and reflects our commitment to working in partnership and in collaboration with others, buddying up if you will! We work collaboratively with a range of stakeholders, including people with dementia and their carers, in our region, who are active members of the Dorset Dementia Partnership a group chaired by a carer of a person with dementia with members from the health and social care fields, private, voluntary and statutory sectors. We have several projects ongoing with clinicians, practitioners and community members across Dorset all aiming to have a positive impact on the lives of those with dementia. As well as working with our colleagues in Dorset, BUDI are actively involved with academics and practitioners across the country on practice developments, funded research, and educational initiatives. We became a member of the national Dementia Action Alliance in 2012 and continue to work within several international networks including INTERDEM, which is a pan-European network of psycho-social researchers, and RADAR which is a Canadian/UK collaborative team. Therefore collaborative working is at the heart of what we do.

All of the research, education and professional practise conducted at BUDI comes under five thematic areas. These are:

• Dementia Awareness and Knowledge Translation
• Dementia Friendly Environments
• Improving Services and Care Provision
• Dementia Friendly Leisure
• Leadership and Staff Development

But no matter what area of thematic work we are undertaking, at the core of what we do is a concern to make a positive impact on the lives of those with dementia. To achieve our objective of making a difference we have run groups for people with dementia, a carers forum, consulted with practitioners, held public meetings and even worked on an art exhibition collating the views of the public and those with dementia about what they understand dementia to be.

My role in BUDI

Dementia has been my specialist research and teaching area for the last 15 years, I have had the privilege of working at Bradford Dementia Group, University of Bradford, and the Dementia Services Development Centre at Stirling University during my career and when I moved to Dorset in January 2012 I was a little unsure about how I could continue to drive my contribution to the dementia field forward having always had other colleagues around me as passionate about dementia and working towards improving the lives of those with dementia as I am. So I was extremely lucky to receive the wholehearted support of Bournemouth University, including some pump prime funding, to create the Bournemouth University Dementia Institute allowing BUDI to launch in May 2012. Not only have we been fortunate enough to secure institutional support but we have also secured the interest from colleagues across the institution who have come together as the BUDI team with diverse interests and disciplinary backgrounds that they have creatively applied to the study of dementia. The energy, enthusiasm and commitment of the team I work with has been the best part of my role as Director of BUDI to date; collectively we have worked on over 20 externally funded projects in our first year, this not only shows the success of the team in responding to opportunities to conduct work in this area, but the vast need to be doing work that will make a difference to peoples’ lives.