Businesses and urban spaces should be designed with dementia design principles in mind, creating an enabling environment for people living with dementia.

Dementia can cause spatial perception difficulties, making it more difficult for a person diagnosed with dementia to find their way around – particularly in unfamiliar or confusing surroundings such as supermarkets and shopping centres.

A person with dementia may experience sensory overload in a typical business or shopping centre environment – aisles often look the same, background noise and bright fluorescent lighting can cause confusion and distress.

If you are a business owner or manager there are a number of steps you can take to ensure your business is dementia friendly:

• Provide staff with training to help them notice when a person may be having cognitive difficulties, and understand how to approach and support that person
• Consider dementia enabling signage that is easily visible and located at eye level to help improve orientation and wayfinding
• Enhance accessibility by using strong colour contrast around doorways and on door handles
• Be mindful of patterned flooring which can create the illusion of holes in the ground
• Improving the physical environment will make it easier for people with dementia to remain engaged in their community.

Find out how to make your business more enabling for a person living with dementia, or how to create a memory café.

For more information about becoming a dementia friendly business please call 1300 66 77 88