Cecilia Anim describes how she was told to take her disabled daughter for a test to see if she could get a job Link to this videoRuth Anim needs constant one-to-one care, has no concept of danger and attends life skills classes to learn practical things like how to make a sandwich or a cup of tea. So it came as a considerable surprise to her mother, Cecilia, that an official assessment of her daughter’s abilities classified her as someone who would be capable of finding work in the near future.
Monthly Archives: October 2012
Singing brings harmony to sufferers of dementia
Dementia is not something anyone would like to associate with their own future.
Rutland Reminders’ volunteers get together for a singing session. They are from left, Clare Hitchcox, Pam Houlden, Janet Berridge, Dr Charles Lawrence, Diana Ellard, Ann Thomas, Mike Gee, Ruth Thomas-Twinn and Gill Lawrence.
Published on Sunday 7 October 2012 07:00
Dementia is not something anyone would like to associate with their own future.
Unless you have had direct experience of it, usually by way of an elderly relative, it’s a thing, like death, that most of us don’t like to think about.
And yet the World Heath Organisation describes dementia as the next global health time bomb: one in four people over 65 will develop it.
A huge worldwide increase in numbers is largely down to increased longevity. The Alzheimer’s Society estimates there are 800,000 sufferers in the UK, only a minority of whom have been diagnosed and who are mostly looked after by an estimated 600,000 unpaid carers.
Rutland Reminders is a group that was set up by a teacher in 2010 to help local sufferers.
‘there are times I could just run out the door’
As told to Joan McFadden Susan Love, a nurse, lives in Paisley with her husband Willie and 19-year-old son Owen, who has cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus. Here, she tells Owen about the love – and the guilt – she feels for him
You’ve always been a bit of a surprise to me, right from the moment I found out I was 26 weeks pregnant at the age of 19.
My first reaction was ‘My mum is going to kill me’ and she wasn’t jumping for joy when I told her. I was in a steady relationship and training to be a nurse but everyone in my class had been warned that if anything stopped us sitting exams we’d have to start from the beginning. There had been an outbreak of sickness in my ward so when I started feeling ill my GP thought I’d picked it up from my patients. I was still suffering from terrible tiredness two weeks later so I went back and saw a locum. I quite like a bit of drama but I wasn’t prepared in the slightest when the nurse came bounding through the door and said: ‘You’re pregnant!’
Get ready for work: what woman who needs constant care was told
Ruth Anim has learning difficulties, a heart problem and epilepsy. A work capability test by Atos said she should prepare for a job
