Waiting Well research project visits the Jollies

Most of our Jolly groups, including our Step Outside Gardening Group, were treated to a visit from Dr Natalie Djohari, from Bournemouth University, and Casey Brett, a Community Arts lecturer. Natalie and Casey’s daughters came along to help, too.

Natalie is leading a project called Waiting Well, which involves creating postcards with collages, drawings and writing to represent the things that people with memory loss, their families or carers find keep them well. On the back, each artist is invited to explain a bit about their postcard images and what it is about the activities they’ve illustrated that is important to them.

Jolly guests, volunteers and staff all had a wonderful time creating their collage postcards and they wrote something personal, either about themselves or about their experience of their time at the Jolly sessions, on the back.

Waiting Well began as an investigation into how families experience memory loss and the winding journey that may take them to the GP, Memory Assessment and eventual diagnosis. They soon realised that families can be at very different stages of the journey, and thought it would be better to find out what people needed to keep well mentally, emotionally and physically and what groups and activities keep them going.

They hope to gain research information from the exercise and to exhibit the postcards in the future.

The project has been funded by National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) Wessex. It is led by Dr Natalie Djohari, from Bournemouth University, in collaboration with Help & Care. It was approved by Bournemouth University Social Sciences & Humanities Research Ethics Panel: Ethics ID 63416.