At the end of 2018 Seniors Rights Victoria (SRV) and Dementia Australia (DA) received funding, as part of the Victorian Government’s Integrated Services Fund, to work in partnership to assist people recently diagnosed with dementia plan for their future. The project involved SRV and DA working together to support people to have conversations with family and friends about their future wishes, as well as to put in place well considered legal protections to ensure those wishes are met, their rights are upheld and to potentially prevent elder abuse from occurring.
Together with Dementia Australia, we designed and delivered information sessions for people recently diagnosed with dementia and their supporters. The information sessions covered the need to plan, how to have the conversations with family and friends, and what decision making capacity means. The sessions also explained the legal implications of Power of Attorney documents, roles and responsibilities of appointed attorneys and how best to manage these.
An evaluation after the first year of the project showed:
In the third year of the project this series of videos was made, so that the important information in the sessions can be easily shared in an engaging way by people outside of SRV or DA.
You can watch these videos in two ways, either one longer video, which contains all the information in one session, or as five shorter videos that can be watched one at a time and followed up with a discussion, before moving on to the next video.
