The Fans Museum has been visiting Sunderland Royal Hospital to work with dementia patients to help evoke happy memories from the past.
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00:00 As you can see we've got a whole host of memorabilia here. We've got old football boots, shin pads, footballs.
00:07 If we scan around here, we've got old football albums.
00:12 Also a whole host of shirts you can see from famous players both currently playing for Sunderland.
00:18 Also you've got Jordan Henderson's England shirt there, a Brazil shirt.
00:22 You can see you've got two of Sunderland's greatest goal scorers there, Jermaine Defoe and Kevin Phillips.
00:30 Here we've got various England caps that players represented Sunderland.
00:35 We've got badges, trophies and all this memorabilia is designed to stimulate the patients who are in the hospital or suffering with dementia.
00:44 Okay then Michael, if you can just tell me what this initiative is all about and why the museum was so keen to get involved.
00:50 What we're doing today is obviously supporting the Alexander Care Unit here in Sunderland City Hospital for cognitive care.
00:58 It's something that I've been doing personally for 10 years and it's grown in a way now that we can see visibly what it actually does for those patients and mental staff and family.
01:11 So today again it's reliving some of the football eras and highlighting now the successful England ladies team we're doing.
01:20 So we've decided to bring along a collection today to engage and keep the positive youth going.
01:26 What are some of the items you've brought along? You mentioned some football shirts, what other gear have you brought?
01:30 We've got an abundance of items today. We've got a good few hundred pieces in terms of medals.
01:37 Medals that have been won by the players. We've got old boots going back 100 years, we've got medals going back 140 years.
01:44 We've got some old rattles, some very, very tactile things, old leather footballs, some random children's footballs which bless them, I've got no idea who would wear them.
01:54 The shirts are powerful because they symbolise a player and from that their families and those patients who need to give will remember these names and obviously very visual and tactile.
02:06 Again we'll try and get a number of people wearing them.
02:10 This is just a collection, it's an abundance. We've got boots, we've got some old stickers. Again it's just childhood memories that can be relived.
02:21 [Background chatter]
02:41 Okay then Maureen, just tell me what this Farns Museum initiative is all about and just how beneficial it is for the patients?
02:47 We bring patients to the centre just to get them off the ward and the environment is totally different in here.
02:55 I think they feel more relaxed and they open up a little bit and they become very chatty.
03:02 Where on the ward they just sit and look on their four walls basically on the ward with no stimulation but when they come round here you see them come alive.
03:13 Obviously you've got a lot of the football memorabilia here today. Sunderland Football Club is a big part of the city. A lot of people do like football.
03:20 So the memorabilia here, how useful is that to stimulate the patients as well?
03:24 They remember a lot of it, especially when Sunderland won the cup in 1973 and they like to talk about the different strips and then they talk about the old water park before the stadium and the like.
03:41 A lot of them haven't even been to the stadium in their lives so you find yourself talking more about water park.
03:49 Does it bring back a lot of happy memories for the patients as well?
03:52 It does, yes, definitely.
03:54 [Background chatter]