I had a conversation yesterday with a friend who had just talked with some of the fascinating folks doing person-centered dementia care in Australia. There is lots of work happening internationally that fell out of the scope of Forget Memory (which is United States-centric), and I start this series of entries to draw people’s attention to some of it.
First I’ll point to my collaborator on the Arts and Dementia Care Resource Guide, the incredibly gentle-spirited John Killick and his partner Kate Allen, who have a website/consulting group called Dementia Positive. John was a teacher for 30 years. In 1989 he began a journey that has led him deep into community-based arts in communities of need – prisons, and now, predominantly, health care settings for older adults. He began by writing poetry with people with dementia. His adventure in writing coincided with the groundbreaking work of Tom Kitwood in England, and Kitwood’s ideas are manifest in John’s elegant, respectful fostering and sharing of voices of people with dementia. Kate is a clinical psychologist with deep community-based experience, whose specialty is working in communication with people with dementia.
The site includes publications (books on poetry, communication, and the arts in general), Allen and Killick’s bios, and bios of fellow travelers.
John and I had the funny experience of collaborating on the Arts and Dementia Care Resource Guide strictly via email. We finally met at the Society for Arts in Dementia Care’s conference on Creative Expression, Communication, and Dementia in Vancouver in May of 2006. To sit and tumble into discussions of his work over the pond as we ate box lunches with a view of mountains and water was the highlight of the conference for me.
