Available here

A Report on our Webinar/Conference 2021

Prison when you are old

Music as therapy in dementia

Dying, death and assisted dying

The day included:

• Back Door Parole.  There are more than 5,000 men aged 60 and over in UK prisons (total population 83,618), 161 of these old men died in prison during the 12 months to June 2021. We will be treated to extracts from a new play called Back Door Parole produced and presented by Journeyman Theatre Company.  It deals with issues affecting older men in prison with disabilities, illness and facing death.  The topic was explored with Lynn Morris of the Company.
• Music as therapy in dementia.  The most-feared illness, other than Covid-19, amongst the 0ver-50s is dementia. Perhaps overshadowed just now by Covid-19 it has made people more vulnerable to the virus and will remain a major source of impairment, illness and distress when the pandemic is hopefully contained.    Kathryn Rowland from ‘All in Sound’ and Barbara Stephens from ‘Dementia Pathfinders’  demonstrated music’s power to help.
• End of life issues.  The pandemic has caused a wider contemplation of life, death and the experience of dying.  For many of us, these recent months have brought us closer to death than ever in our lifetimes. The Covid-19 pandemic has increased deaths in this country and throughout the world, some deaths have followed directly from the virus, others by its indirect impact as health and care services have been stretched and people have been fearful to seek help symptoms of other illnesses. This has led to wider contemplation of life, death and the experience of dying, how this is approached and even its legal framework.
  Graham Hawley, a retired Methodist minister, and James Woodward, Principal of Sarum College addressed the issues.

The day concluded with an opportunity to tell Christians on Ageing about local initiatives and to encourage our growing and responsive ecumenical organisation to take up new challenges, which will help us to plan new ways of giving support, spreading ideas and promoting good practice.