The Butterfly Scheme has well and truly arrived in Northern Ireland with launches in the first three of the five NI trusts. First came Lurgan Hospital (Southern Trust), where there was a real party atmosphere, complete with a huge range of party food and butterfly balloons! Next came Ulster Hospital, where staff came out with comments such as “it really makes you think” and showed that they were already reflecting on the patient and carer perspective. At Antrim Area Hospital, attendance records were broken – with no fewer than 354 members of staff attending sessions during the day! In each of the hospitals, it was clear that staff were very receptive to the scheme’s whole-hospital approach and wanted to create consistency of care response for people needing memory support.
It was Professor June Andrews and the Dementia Services Development Centre who invited the scheme to give a presentation to all interested NI leads and who subsequently sourced funding for the initial series of four launches, so the Butterfly Scheme would like to warmly thank them for their confidence in it. DSDC has been a wonderful host and has very much smoothed the way for these initial launches. The commitment shown by the incoming hospitals so far gives us every reason to expect very positive results.
