Healthy Minds For Future Generations: Promoting Dementia Risk Reduction - All Nations Centre

Thursday 14th December 2017
With Public Health Network Cymru

The seminar was chaired by Daisy Cole – Director of Wellbeing and Empowerment, Older People’s Commissioner for Wales. It was held on 14 December 2017 at the All Nations Centre in Cardiff.

The first presentation was by Professor Peter Elwood OBE – a researcher at Cardiff University, who presented on ‘Predictors of Dementia – Reducing the Risk’. His talk focused on the work that he and the Division of Population Medicine at Cardiff University had done in their work on the Caerphilly Cohort Study. This covered a variety of predictive factors, and included mention of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales.  He mentioned that the correct lifestyle choice was more effective than any pill could be.

This was followed by Phill Chick, the Assistant Director of the Mental Health Delivery Unit. His presentation was entitled ‘Making Dementia Risk Reduction a Priority for Wales’. His talk covered risk reduction and why it should be a priority, for whom and what had been done so far to date. He iterated that the predominant advice for dementia prevention concerns lifestyle and also mentioned change 4 life and the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 as well as the Public Health (Wales) Act 2017.

The final presentation was by Sue Phelps from Alzheimer’s Society Wales with Nigel, a gentleman living with dementia, on volunteers in Gwent.  Sue provided an overview Alzheimer’s Society’s ‘In Your Shoes – We Get It’ volunteer programme and Nigel gave delegates a personal insight on his experiences of living with dementia.

The presentations were followed up with a question and answer session, where the speakers took questions from the room with Daisy Cole presiding.

After a break for lunch, three sessions were held, with Shana Thomas (Sports Wales) and Vicki Sutton (Welsh Sports Association) holding a session in parallel with Sharon Ford from the National Museum Wales. The third session was hosted by Bronia Bendall from Natural Resources Wales. Following the final session Daisy Cole presented her closing remarks to the room before the event closed for the day.

Malcolm Ward of Public Health Network Cymru also hosted a series of questions using live polling software where members of the audience could vote in real time. The results of the poll can be found in the resource materials below.

The event was also live streamed via twitter, which had 23 live viewers on the day.  The stream can be viewed here: https://twitter.com/PHNetworkCymru/status/941256283369459713