‘EngAGING’ to create dementia-friendly communities

By Shawn Ryan

Jessica Freeman’s grandfather was attending college and working a full-time job in the 1940s, but it all became too much.

“He told me he had to drop out of college because he was working another job and fell asleep in the bathtub. It was like, ‘Well, I can do one or the other,’” says Freeman, assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Despite having no degree, he was one of the smartest men she knew. A world traveler, he gathered knowledge everywhere he went. Before he died in 2011, though, some of that man was disappearing.

“He was exhibiting the signs of dementia when he passed away,” she recalls. “It was something that deeply touched my family. We could see over the course of time his struggles with that illness.”

Her personal experience makes Freeman’s involvement in the UTC School of Nursing’s engAGING Communities Southeast Tennessee especially important to her.

The program, created in 2020 with a grant of about $28,000 from the Tennessee Department of Health, is part of an effort to create a series of support systems to make the state “dementia-friendly.”

To that end, the Department of Health has created a “toolkit,” says Kristi Wick, assistant professor and Vicky B. Gregg Chair of gerontology in the School of Nursing at UTC.

“It’s basically like a recipe book for individual communities to become dementia-friendly,” she explains. The “recipes” are: Building Community Capacity; First Responders; Building Volunteer Capacity; Engaging Healthcare Capacity; Supporting Faith Organizations; Early Detection and Accurate Diagnosis.

Using the Department’s starting points, engAGING Communities Southeast Tennessee and other regional organizations reach out to an array of local groups, building local coalitions to develop a support system for those suffering with dementia.

In Chattanooga, engAGING Communities, among other outreach, has held local workshops—both in-person and virtually. It has developed radio public service announcements to get the word out about the engAGING program.

“Using the resources that we all have as a community, then trying to look at things that help support people. A lot of times it doesn’t take money,” Wick says.

One important result of information and resources is for coalition members to learn the difference between the various diseases that constitute dementia, Wick says.

“Dementia is an umbrella term. Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia fall under that,” she says.

“There’s a lot of different names out there, but the bottom line is dementia. And there’s an importance to getting it diagnosed correctly, which type you have, because they look completely different.”

With her background in communication, Freeman says providing useful information is critical. Her family desperately needed information when dealing with her grandfather but didn’t always have it, she says.

“We really struggled to find resources in our community that could help us,” Freeman says. “I can see the benefit of something like this to try and put together the pieces to make an overwhelming situation a little less overwhelming for families who are suffering.”