Celebrating GOLD Week: Cherishing Memories, Embracing Change

Recently we held our first Growing Older with Learning Disabilities (GOLD) week. We provide support to around 50 people who are between the ages of 65 and 97 years old, and the aim of GOLD week was to celebrate, recognise and reminisce with these wonderful individuals and their amazing staff teams. For many of the older people we support, they have had many years living in care, so it is a different experience than those without a learning disability. Sometimes for the staff teams that support them, they identify more as a learning disability service, so we also wanted to highlight the changes in social care and health needs people have as they get older. We started the week with some experience based training for staff on falls prevention, identifying health decline and speaking to health professionals, dementia awareness and sensory reminiscence activities. We held a memory café event and reminded ourselves how much food has changed over the decades, tested our memories on fashions, music, films/tv and cultural events and generally reminisced about the past. The rest of the week was a crazy roadshow across East Surrey, visiting services and doing some great activities to keep people active and some sensory reminiscence. We learned a lot about the wonderful people we support, their staff teams and we look forward to doing it all again next year!