Forgetfulness Feelings and Farnarkling (FFF)

Reflections on Aged Care and How you can make a difference

Forgetfulness, Feelings & Farnarkling   (Farnarkling – the group activity where everyone sits around discussing the need to ‘do something’ but nothing actually happens – Urban Dictionary)

The project began in mid 2012 – an idea born from a discussion between two friends, artist Jenny Masters and dementia consultant Anne Kelly.  Both had been touched in personal ways by dementia and had seen examples of skilled, compassionate care within dementia support services. However, they were also aware of examples of care deficits at individual or organisational level and the question arose “What can we do to change this?”

By telling peoples’ own stories and highlighting aspects of life from the points of view of people living with dementia, and the people close to them, they hoped to encourage discussion and to challenge existing care systems and practise, with faith that any modern dynamic enterprise thrives on feedback from its customer base.

With occasional artistic license this collection of illustrations represents real people’s stories from almost 30 years of working in aged care. The book uses humour as a strategy to encourage reflection of practice without defensiveness. We trust that these combined stories will provide strength of evidence of some outcomes of the current system of care and therefore will provoke reflection and action. Many examples of innovative actions are given.

Each illustration, its accompanying story and explanation gives life to the voices of people living with dementia.

This provocative and inspirational book.