A PROJECT that started with pieces of card, pens and sticky tape - and a lot of passion - has led to an initiative that is transforming life for people living with dementia and their carers and could be rolled out nationally.

Cat Ritson is a mental health nurse who grew up in Maldon and now lives in Colchester. She is the woman behind a new micro website called iCareDementia. It is available to everyone, currently used across North Essex and Suffolk – and being looked at for a much wider rollout by NHS England.

The principle of the project is simple. It's a place where people caring for those living with dementia, whether at home or in a care setting, can access quick, easy-to-understand, bullet-point information on how to approach different situations to best serve the needs of the person they are caring for.

Cat explains: "It was while I was supporting care homes in Suffolk that the staff and I identified a gap in training provision. Care home staff didn't always have time to attend lengthy training sessions or read through a support guide in the middle of a patient intervention.

"There's a tendency by most people to put too many things down to dementia. For example, when someone shouts, it's easy to think that it's because they have dementia. But dementia doesn't make you shout.

"If a person with dementia is shouting, it's often because something else is wrong. One of the key things that dementia deprives people of is the ability to express themselves."

Failing to recognise what the person's unmet need is can in turn lead to serious health issues such as sepsis or other infections, for example, being missed.

So Cat started making prompt cards in collaboration with care staff, for them to use in different situations, starting off with one that looked at 'behaviour that challenges'. The card contained a simple bullet point checklist of things for the carer to try when faced with challenges. Then she moved on to creating a card on 'dementia medication and side effects' – and then others until there was a little pack of them. Cat made them wipe clean and bound them together on rings so they could be kept conveniently handy for care staff.

Cat created the 'I Care' forum across Suffolk with the development of the cards at its heart, with contributions from different specialists to cover different situations a carer could be confronted with and the same easy-to-read, bullet-point advice to help them through.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic came along, with all its challenges for care homes.

"I realised we needed to do things differently," Cat explains, "and I knew from feedback that people found the cards helpful and that they were needed more than ever for more people because of the isolation many carers in the community were facing.

"I knew I had to make it happen bigger, so I went to the CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group) and asked if we could have an app."

At this stage of the project, Cat began to work alongside Gail Cardy, Transformation Project Manager for Mental Health across Suffolk and North Essex, on taking the iCareDementia technology forward.

"She really got the vision and got really excited with me," Cat says.

"We spoke to anyone and everyone who would listen to get the project off the ground," she adds, "but there's a lot of red tape around apps and in the end we realised that what we needed was a micro site that would be accessible to everybody."

Cat and Gail worked with carers, local hospital trusts, as well as reaching out to the private care sector and home care agencies. They looked at how useful iCareDementia could be for carers in a family setting and focussed on reaching the widest audience possible.

The pair were also passionate that the information needed to be available in different languages and it has now been translated into the five most popular after English across Suffolk and North Essex, including Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian and Portuguese.

"The simplicity has stayed the same," Cat explains, "as I didn't want to lose that."

There are suggestions for further reading, too, if users of iCareDementia want more detailed information on a topic.

Anyone who wants to use the site can do so for free. While some information on the contacts page is currently relevant to the North Essex and Suffolk area, the rest is suitable for anyone anywhere in the country. All anyone who wants to use it needs to do is go to the website at icaredementia.org and they can also use the 'add to homepage' feature for ease of access when revisiting.

"It's free and there for the taking," Cat says, "and I'm so excited.

"It started its journey in December 2019 and despite Covid, we still didn't lose sight of it – because it's a real passion project which has been truly co-produced."