Currently we have about 300,000 people living in Australia with dementia and because of the aging of our population by 2050 that'll be almost a million people.
Hi my name is Lynne Philipson I'm an NHMRC dementia fellow. If I going to make a community more dementia friendly it's not going to be something that happens because of a single person or because of a single discipline. A program like Global Challenges was really important to address a complex sticky problem like improving a community environment we need to be able to work with researchers and people with expertise about how we engage the community members how we work to improve knowledge and attitudes around dementia.
So the disciplines that we engaged to help us see if we could make came and dementia friendly were engineering psychologists and designers human geographers and public health researchers well as Richard Fleming.
I'm a professorial fellow here in the School of Nursing at the University of Hong Kong my speciality is Environmental Design for people with dementia so within the dementia friendly communities project I've been working on developing a way of evaluating public buildings. One of the real strengths of this project has been working with people with dementia and their carers. Without their help it wouldn't have been possible to develop the assessment tool that we've developed having them in the development team was an extremely important in fact a vital part of the project.
I'm Kris Burton Holly and I'm a human geographer. With this project I work with GIS. I'm helping bring together all the for this the maps have really been helpful in letting us know about the places and spaces that are important for people living with dementia and they've really helped the community understand.
The maps have helped us understand some of those aspects of the physical environment that have been challenging things like particular crosswalks and sidewalks signage on particular streets. Dementia is a global challenge and it's not one that we can fix just with medical solutions it's one that we have to fix it a community level and it takes all of us to make a change.