With the Club holding the second dementia-friendly matchday on Wednesday during the second day of the LV= Insurance County Championship clash against Warwickshire, the ECB Reporters Network have written about Dementia Carers Count, their work at Middlesex and their ambitions moving forward.
Around 650,000 UK families include a person living with dementia, bringing significant stress and pressure for relatives who must adjust to taking on the role of carer.
Dementia Carers Count, a charity set up to raise awareness of the challenges facing family carers and provide support, have linked up with Middlesex CCC to harness cricket – and love of the sport – as a means of helping to alleviate those issues.
Middlesex hosted a dementia-friendly matchday during their LV= County Championship fixture against Surrey earlier this summer, when people with dementia and their family members were invited to spend the day at Lord’s free of charge.
The second such event takes place on Wednesday 20th September, on day two of the county’s game against Warwickshire and Dementia Carers Count representatives will again be at Lord’s throughout the day to chat and offer information and advice.
DCC trustee Raja Badrakallimuthu explains the idea behind bringing people with dementia and their family carers together to enjoy a day of county cricket…
“Studies say about 40 to 50 per cent of family carers of people with dementia have clinically significant depression. We need to try and find ways of having a sense of normalcy in the relationship, so family carers can be family and not full-time carers, which can become very difficult for them.
“The idea is to have an organisation carers can contact not just in crisis, but at any time and feel they’re being listened to. Where there are issues to be sorted out, whether it be working with social care, GPs or mental health services or gaining psychological support for the carer, they can access help through our dedicated free support line. We have a vast amount of resources online and we also run a carers’ clinic with specialist professionals on a monthly basis, so we take questions from carers and try to provide them with answers.
“With most respite offerings, the carer has to completely distance themselves from the person with dementia and that comes with a lot of anxieties for both of them. So we tried to bring the person with dementia and the carer together and cricket has that kind of space – it’s not that intense and offers the opportunity for them to dip in and dip out as and when they need.
“The generation largely now presented with dementia are a generation that would have grown up watching cricket or at least listening to Test Match Special, so they often have fond memories that haven’t been tapped into. Long-term memory is a bigger strength for people with dementia and the more we tap into it, the more they feel validated and purposeful.
“By talking about something they’re familiar with, they become less anxious, irritable and depressed. It’s easier for the carer to spend time reminiscing about cricket, having those normal family conversations rather than always talking about the illness itself or other problems.
“Being a Middlesex member, I approached the club about the idea and Middlesex have been one of the forerunners in terms of promoting equality of access to cricket for people with dementia. The support from Middlesex has been phenomenal – for the players to do a video feature for us and Russell Grant making a video as well, these expressions of support were most unexpected. They were very willing to offer us so many free tickets for people with dementia and their carers – we’re so thankful for that and everyone at Lord’s has also been very helpful.
“Middlesex are keen to try and offer a degree of dementia specific expertise to the stewards and we’ve agreed that they can access training on the DCC website for free. There are a lot of practical training packages online which we’ve made available to Middlesex and the MCC. For instance, people with dementia might get slightly flustered when they’re being frisked at the entrance point and it’s important to go about that in an understanding way.
“We’re hoping the ECB will be in a position to support similar kind of requests at county grounds across the country and make it more accessible. We had 22 people with dementia and at least one of their family members visiting Lord’s in July and it was interesting that there was a wide age range among the family members as well. We thought it would mostly be spouses, but we also had children and even grandchildren and it was really nice to provide that link between generations, bringing grandparents to cricket with their grandchildren.
“With one of the families that came along, the lady who had dementia had been to Lord’s before and had been to the museum to see the Ashes urn. So the highlight of her day was going there and seeing the urn – there was a very tangible connection, particularly with it being an Ashes year. She was ecstatic after being there again and her daughter told us ‘I have never seen Mum so happy since the dementia diagnosis was made’.”
Visit www.dementiacarers.org.uk for more information.
