Rutland MP Alicia Kearns launches Rutland's Great Dementia Conversation
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00:00 I'm here this afternoon with Alicia Kerns MP. We're here at Victoria Hall in Oakham
00:05 and we're just about to have a speech about dementia from John and Nuala Soushe.
00:11 Now tell me how did this come about because this is your doing isn't it?
00:14 Because they were kind enough to say yes when I asked which is amazing of them.
00:19 So a few months ago, well actually last September, I was doing some work
00:22 around what are the major public health conditions we have. We are an incredibly
00:25 healthy county but dementia is a real outlier. We are significantly, we have a
00:30 significantly lower diagnosis rate for dementia in a county than we should have and so
00:34 I've been working on how do we you know break down the barriers around talking
00:38 around dementia, how do we get our county to become more dementia friendly and I
00:41 thought I'd ask John and Nuala to come and share their personal stories and today
00:45 we launched Rutland's Great Dementia Conversation.
00:47 Now is this something that's affected you and your family personally because it seems to affect an awful lot of people these days.
00:53 So one in two people will either have dementia or care for someone with it but I've been very lucky that in my lifetime
00:58 no, neither of my parents had dementia before I lost them. But it affects so many. We have hundreds of people in Rutland living with dementia without a diagnosis.
01:07 And I know people are scared about what a diagnosis means. A diagnosis means getting support, it means getting the help you need, not just for you but also for your family and loved ones.
01:15 Well it does look as if the hall is filling up very rapidly. We're looking forward to this. Thank you for arranging it.
01:21 Thank you for asking John and Nuala to come and let's raise that awareness about dementia in the county of Rutland.
01:27 Well thank you to you for your help and this is the start of a journey, it's the start of a conversation. There's a lot more events and work to be done.
01:33 In fact today I will be announcing that Angela Rippon has agreed also to come to Rutland in June.
01:38 So we can't wait for her to come and be part of that conversation.
01:41 Thank you very much indeed.
01:42 My pleasure.