In April this year Touchstone BME Dementia Service partnered with Phoenix Health and Wellbeing to provide a year of massage therapy sessions for our Dementia Café members. Once a month, we have two therapists from Phoenix join us for an hour at the Café, and they provide a variety of different workshops for our group. Phoenix’s Health and Wellbeing sessions at our Dementia Café have been absolutely brilliant and the group are thoroughly enjoying the sessions. Phoenix has worked with our clients on a 1-1 basis, giving massages and offering tips and advice to maintain their wellbeing. As many of our members have long term health conditions, Gill and the team have offered specific tips to help manage these. For the carers in our group, the massage therapy sessions have proven to be vital leisure time where they can really unwind and take time to focus on their own needs, which we know can be rare for carers.
We have seen Gill and her team build great rapport with the group, offering chance to relax, enjoy their massages and have a friendly chat. Gill also ran a group session where she taught the group to give hand and arm massages, which was an enjoyable activity for everyone and they are pleased to be learning new skills. We run our café twice a month, with Phoenix visiting once a month; every time they ask us “Will we be getting our massages today?”
We are looking forward to continuing our work with Phoenix and seeing our members learn lots of useful new things to support their wellbeing.
