Helping Your Team Welcome People with Dementia Outdoors
Rain or shine, your team keeps Britain’s parks, woodlands, coastlines, and community spaces open for everyone.
And with an ageing population, you’ll increasingly meet people with dementia – but are you confident your staff know how to support people with dementia to get outdoors safely, inclusively, and with dignity?
The challenge
Your team members want to help people with dementia enjoy nature, but many will struggle with:
- Knowing how to support someone with dementia to get outdoors safely
- Responding when someone becomes disoriented, distressed, or vulnerable
- Communicating confidently and respectfully
- Adapting activities, trails, or facilities to be inclusive
Without guidance, staff may hesitate, visitors may miss out on the benefits of the outdoors, and your organisation could unintentionally exclude people who would otherwise thrive outside
Where you could go wrong
Even experienced staff and volunteers can stumble into common challenges:
- Seeing a person with dementia as a “risk” rather than a visitor enjoying the outdoors
- Worrying about saying or doing the wrong thing
- Feeling unsure how to handle confusion or distress in an outdoor setting
- Missing opportunities to offer uplifting nature experiences
- Stress around responsibility, safeguarding, or duty of care
These uncertainties can leave teams feeling tense and people with dementia staying indoors, losing access to the wellbeing benefits of fresh air, nature, and movement.
Our solution
We offer practical, outdoor-focused dementia awareness training designed specifically for teams who want to support people with dementia to get outdoors.
- Tailored team training: Built around your site, your visitors, and your staff
- Real-world outdoor guidance: Communication strategies, risk management, and inclusive activity planning
- Site audits: Spot opportunities to make parks, gardens, trails, and attractions more dementia-inclusive
- Online upskilling: Ideal for individual rangers, volunteers, and staff
- Proven expertise: We’ve trained over 17,000 staff and volunteers across parks, heritage sites, local authorities, green/blue space providers, and community organisations
With our support, your team becomes confident, your outdoor spaces become welcoming, and people with dementia can continue enjoying the freedom, joy, and wellbeing of being outdoors.
The Dementia Adventure Difference
- Lived experience: Over a decade delivering supported outdoor holidays for people with dementia
- Practical tools: Everything we teach is grounded in what works outdoors
- Tailored to you: Every session adapts to your environment, challenges, and visitor needs
Our results
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”
Next steps
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.
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.