Helping Your Team Welcome People with Dementia Outdoors
With an ageing population, your team will increasingly meet people with dementia—but are you confident they’re equipped to include visitors safely, respectfully, and with dignity?
Solutions for you and your team
The challenge
People without experience of dementia can often treat them as a risk rather than as someone enjoying the outdoors. Teams may worry about saying or doing the wrong thing, or be unsure how to respond if someone becomes distressed, disorientated, or vulnerable while outside.
That uncertainty can prevent your team from offering the safe, inclusive, and memorable experiences that visitors deserve.
How we guide you
We’ve spent over a decade delivering supported holidays, living alongside people with dementia and their families 24 hours a day. This unique perspective allows us to listen, learn, and shape training based on real challenges – giving your team practical, real-world solutions.
To date, we’ve trained over 17,000 staff and volunteers from organisations including medical and care professionals, outdoor providers, local authorities, and charities.
How we support your people
- Make spaces more accessible: Site audits give you practical ideas and the confidence to optimise your environment.
- Improves work environment and job satisfaction
- Increases trust between family and staff
- Increases person centred support
In addition to our training, we will give you comprehensive resource packs and tool kits. As with the training, these can be adapted to your needs and used as practical guides to implement your learning and upskill team members.
Depending on the project, we can offer you on-going support, follow up training and regular check-ins too.
To find out more about our training and how we may be able to help you, get in touch to book your free 30 minute telephone consultation.
People without experience of dementia can often treat them as a risk rather than as someone enjoying the outdoors. Teams may worry about saying or doing the wrong thing, or be unsure how to respond if someone becomes distressed, disorientated, or vulnerable while outside.
That uncertainty can prevent your team from offering the safe, inclusive, and memorable experiences that visitors deserve.
This was a very empowering training - passionate, revealing and realistic.
I will consider using the outdoors much more in my work, something I was planning, but feel I have more confidence in the application”
“High quality, professional, informative and developmental”
Care Homes / Live at Home Schemes and Medical Professionals
Organisations tell us that supporting people with dementia to get outdoors can help to ease agitation and anxiety, improve sleep, eating patterns, mood and communication which can have a positive effect on the person but also on the staff supporting them.
Our work with care homes and live at home schemes often involves training staff, volunteers and residents’ families so they can work together to enable people with dementia to get regular access to the benefits of nature and the outdoors.
Blue and Green spaces
People with dementia and their families tell us they struggle to find places to visit that provide lovely nature experiences that are also accessible.
Our work with Blue and Green space providers considers the importance of accessibility and opportunities to open up to a much bigger market, not only for people living with dementia and their carers (There are 900,000 people living with dementia in the UK and over 700,000 people caring for them at home), but others too. When you get it right for people with dementia, you get it right for so many others.
We can offer you a range of support from site audits to help you become dementia inclusive, to training your volunteers, upskilling your teams, and supporting you to work with carers in simple and effective ways.
Why Choose Dementia Adventure?
Unlike other providers, we’re able to use our practical experience of delivering activities directly to inform our training.
During our supported holidays, we live with people who have dementia and their family members for 24 hours a day. This gives us a unique opportunity to listen and learn about the challenges that people face. Their voices shape all of our training, leading to practical positive solutions and ‘real world’ guidance for you and your organisation.
Whether you’re looking to upskill those who already support people living with dementia, create inclusive and accessible services across your organisation or set up a nature-based program specifically for people with dementia, we can help you to:
- Understand how dementia can affect the senses.
- Facilitate sensory rich experiences.
- Understand the health and wellbeing benefits of nature.
- Make the most of your setting.
- Learn how to engage with nature indoors.
- Learn how to engage and enable people with small, simple steps.
- Discover what matters most to people.
- Understand what makes a dementia inclusive location.
- Understand why calculated risk is important.
- Upskill volunteers.
Solutions for you and your team
Some organisations we have supported
Some of our work
Bradgate Park is a very popular public park close to the city of Leicester in the East Midlands. It covers 850 acres and has special protection status for its ancient trees, geology and wildlife.
Vicky Peet leads Froglife’s Leaping Forward for Dementia project, supported by the City Bridge Trust. The project empowers people living with dementia to access the benefits of nature and the outdoors.
We worked with Methodist Homes Association (MHA) to develop a tailored programme of training to enable their staff to support people living with dementia and families. MHA is a charity with over 75 years’ experience of delivering care and support for older people across the UK.
In 2021 The Caversham Golf Club in Reading chose Dementia Adventure as their Captain’s charity of the year, successfully raising £10,000. The partnership with The Caversham Golf Club was about more than just money. We wanted to leave a legacy of support for people living with dementia in the Reading area.
Managing Risk and Nature Experiences Training
In response to demand, we are pleased to offer you the chance to attend our affordable Managing Risk and Nature Experiences training.
Many organisations already understand that connection to nature brings significant wellbeing benefits for people living with dementia, but they may not have the knowledge or confidence to create inclusive and enjoyable experiences for people with the condition.
Our Managing Risk and Nature Experiences training is for professionals and volunteers interested in creating inclusive outdoor or nature-based experiences for people living with dementia.
