Our podcast guest today is Nicole Smith from Australia. She is a nurse and a gerontologist who is extremely passionate about giving people who have dementia their best lives.

When you hear the story of Nicole’s upbringing, you will understand why she loves being with older people and why she fights for human rights for our elders.

After becoming a registered nurse, she was recruited by a nursing home and quickly given responsibility for a large dementia unit others didn’t want to manage. After many successful years working in this area, she decided there must be a better way to support our elders.

This is when she decided to create a different social model based around community, where people feel safe, happy and are connected with different generations. She established this model while bring up her children and studying for her master’s in Gerontology. Her model showed a difference, was recognised and shared on social media. This is when Dr Rodney stepped in and supported her to create a training programme enabling her to share the model with other professionals.

When the pandemic happened and people couldn’t meet, Nicole became a COVID responder, spending large chunks of time away from her family, responsible for crisis management in different Care Home throughout Australia. This reinforced a desperate need for alternatives to care homes and gave her renewed self confidence to reconnect with Dr Rodney to create a better model.

Together they have created their own care model, Community Home Australia. Listen and understand their care home solution and consider what you could learn and apply to your own life. Its truly person centred, where everybody supports one another as part of an extended family, with medical care available when needed.

Hear more about Nicole’s latest inclusive movement linking bright minds from across the globe who are passionately dedicated to making changes in the lives of our elders/older adults/loved ones.

You can email Nicole Smith at nicole@communityhomeaustralia.org
Find out about Community home Australia https://communityhomeaustralia.org/
Sign up for OpenTheDoors https://openthedoors.au/

You can contact us at the following:
Dr Carol Sargent: https://sargentgroup.consulting/
Dr Tom Adler: https://getbide.com/

Our guest today is Charles Lowe who is the chief executive of Digital Health and Care Alliance (DACA), he is an expert in telehealth and telecare.

Throughout his career he has worked on technologies to support others. He shares with us how he wanted to open people’s eyes to recognise what technology can do to help people and how everybody can become digitally literate.

Growing up, Charles did voluntary work with his mother and saw firsthand the challenges faced by a broad range of people, particularly as they got older.

From a young child Charles had a passion for electronic engineering. In the late 1960s while still at school, he built a computer from scratch and developed a system to automatically open and close his bedroom window. After studying Material Science at Cambridge, he developed electronic solutions for a range of companies.
Over the years Charles has been involved in many initiatives, working with different organisations, to engage people of all ages to embrace digital technology, including “take your grandparent to school day”. He recognises the lives of people caring for their loved ones could be improved through access to computers – allowing them to improve their mental health by continuing to work whilst caring.

At BT he led the development of their intranet and was instrumental in developing the first commercial digital offering from BT, including digitalisation of the police force and local governments departments.

We talk about the huge speed at which new technologies are being introduced, and discuss whether we are actually making the best of them or moving on to new ideas too quickly? He highlights the importance of digital innovations that now allow patients to be monitored in their own homes, speeding up treatment times and reducing the pressures on hospital admissions. He emphasises the knock-on effect that people can remain in their own homes, doctors can focus on people they need to see in person and fewer people need to travel to be treated.

As you’ll hear, Charles believes that with effective implementation of current telecare and telehealth we can make the world a more inclusive place for everybody.

You can email Charles at charles.lowe@dhaca.org.uk

You can contact us at the following:
Dr Carol Sargent: https://sargentgroup.consulting/
Dr Tom Adler: https://getbide.com/

Today’s guest on our podcast is Louise Thompson, who has set up the app Myfolks.

She tells us about growing up in a particularly poor area in the west end of Newcastle, in the North East of England. Louise’s first job was at the Freeman Hospital where she was involved in some cardiovascular research that was published in a medical journal. Through this work she managed to gain admission to Northumbria University, where she graduated with a degree in Law.

After gaining an MSc, while working in a senior corporate leadership position in Hampshire, Louise’s parents, who lived in the North East, became ill with dementia. There followed a desperate time, travelling backwards and forwards to support her parents, whilst working full time and managing the family home.

She talks about the issues her parents had, and although not needing personal care, they did need practical and emotional support. This is when she realised that she had to find some help but couldn’t find any.

So, she began to think about creating an app that would connect people who could provide support for those families who couldn’t book ahead and needed it in real time. Then, the app Myfolks was created.

Louise shares the challenges she had from the time taken to set up the app, the cost and the issues of being a solopreneur.

She shares that one in seven of us is now caring while still working, and how it has a disproportionate effect on women in the workforce. In addition, there can be even greater challenges for the smaller number of men who are carers, and the impact it can have on their ‘masculine’ identity and their self-esteem.

She talks about the important need for employers to understand when their employees are struggling with caring responsibilities for their parents, highlighting that it’s not just the pull on their time, but also the emotional strain.

Presently Myfolks is in the North East, Cumbria, St Helens, Warrington, Humberside, Lincolnshire and Sussex. Louise aims to focus on the coastal towns and the outskirts of large cities, because they tend to have a higher population of the elderly, and often have fewer services.

You can contact us at the following:
Louise Thompson: https://www.myfolks.uk/
Dr Carol Sargent: https://sargentgroup.consulting/
Dr Tom Adler: https://getbide.com/