Keeping people connected: the role of day services in community wellbeing

Madeline Cooper, Programme Director of our Equal Lives team reflects on how spending time with people living with dementia has helped her further understand the potential of day services as a powerful force for prevention.

Supporting people to stay connected, active, and rooted in their communities, while also easing pressure on families and local economies is key.

I’ve recently had the privilege of spending time with people with dementia who have support by day services in two different London boroughs. This has both challenged some of my own assumptions, and also given me the clues about what we need to do, to create the best opportunities for people to keep living a good life with dementia. Much of the work I do day-to-day in NDTi is trying to make sure that people who need support aren’t intentionally or accidentally institutionalised and cut off from the communities they belong in. All too often, when someone develops needs around health or care as they age, the only option they are offered takes them out of their social networks.

When we hear about day services or day centres, we picture a building surrounded by fences, with unknown care activities going on inside. We might imagine that it's not a place we would want to go in the future, preferring to get help at home and continue seeing our friends and doing the things we love. But those places don’t have to be the way we envisage. And, sometimes the support from these services are the key to people remaining at home and keeping socially connected.

Listening to people using these services and their families showed me the following:

• People want to have spaces to connect with others.
• People want to stay living in their own homes, in their own neighbourhoods.
• Being around welcoming, smiling faces and regular conversations touches people emotionally, even if they don’t recall people’s names or what they did that day.
• Sometimes they want a building to do this in, especially as public buildings become scarier and harder to navigate.
• People’s interests and hobbies remain with them, and the chance to continue these, and use their strengths and skills, has positive well-being and cognitive benefits for people with dementia.
• People might say they don’t want to go to “that place” initially (I imagine I would!), but given the chance to try it, most want to keep going to see their new friends and get the peer support of others in a similar situation.
• Carers, often husbands, wives, grown-up children, can keep working, making them remain financially secure and contributing to the world around them, if their family member has the right support during the day.
• Carers want the opportunity to connect with others living through similar experiences, make sense of their experiences, and learn from people with more expertise about dementia.

Day services can provide all of these, and in doing so, prevent people from having to move into care settings if they don’t want to, and help families remain economically active. This has a huge (but largely unmeasured) impact for the local community, council, and economy. It is key to prevention.

The challenges when people are often supported in groups and in buildings that might not be open to the wider community are:

• How do we keep people connected to their wider communities?
• How do we make sure they are still using their strengths and following their interests?
• How do we make sure that the activities people take part in don’t simply become pretend versions of what the rest of us expect to participate in?

These are the challenges that the Days to Communities learning programme addresses, by bringing together ideas, practical actions, and guest speakers with a range of expertise, and also drawing on the ideas and learning of the group.

The programme is relevant to people working or commissioning day services and supports for all groups of people, not just those with dementia.

Read more about Days to Communities and find out how your services can better connect and support people and families in your community.