This year’s Dementia Conference will put a new focus on raising awareness of the disease among Bermuda’s younger generation.

Expert dementia trainers will visit Gilbert Institute in Paget on Thursday to speak to pupils between the ages of seven and nine about dementia.

Organisers of the conference hope to expand their work into other schools across the Island as part of their ongoing mission to dispel misconceptions about dementia and provide help to people who have relatives or friends with the condition.

The three-day conference begins tomorrow at the Wind-Reach facility in Warwick and has been organised by Action on Alzheimers and Dementia and WindReach.

This is the third time a Dementia Conference has been held in Bermuda, and this year dementia experts Sarah Mould and Tim Forester-Morgan from The Dementia Training Company will return to make presentations and provide insight into the disease.

This year’s conference will also feature a community day on Friday for the first time.

“The idea is to raise awareness across the community and get many people involved in the conference,” said Liz Stewart, of Action on Alzheimers and Dementia.

“We are excited about getting these trainers out into the school system speaking to the students. This is the first time that this will have happened.

“We realise that we need to raise awareness of dementia among the young to help them better understand the condition and this is the beginning or what we hope will be an expansion of our work in that area.

“There is still a stigma attached to dementia and we need to move away from that and help people realise that this is a disease like other diseases and that there are lots of things we can do to help people with it.

“People tend to think it just affects very old people, but that is not correct. It can affect people who are younger than 65.”

The training conference will consist of a series of workshops and presentations about dementia, non pharmacological interventions and information on therapeutic activities.

Erica Fulton, executive director of WindReach added: “This is the first time we have held a community day and it’s part of our programme of helping people across the community to better understand dementia.

“People from across the community will come across dementia on a daily basis, but may have no idea how to deal with it.

“The purpose of the community day is to educate those people like police officers about the condition and give them some insight into how to handle people who have dementia.”

If you would like to attend the conference e-mail efulton@windreach.bm or call Ms Fulton on 238-2469 to register.