Future journeys

Go Upstream’s work has always been about bringing people with dementia together with service providers to design better journeys. Finding those aspects of getting out and about that can be a real barrier and creating opportunities to work together on changes that could make a big difference.

So how to respond to this global situation when we can’t physically bring people together and or take journeys?

There isn’t an easy, immediate answer and maybe there shouldn’t be.

We’ve pressed a global pause button on moving around and it’s forcing us to ask some huge questions that are going to take some thinking through. What will the role of public transport be? Will we move around in the same way, in the same numbers? What will new services look like and what will give us all the confidence to use them?

People with dementia have shared their experience of uncertainty and anxiety on journeys and we’ve spoken many times about the need for services to inspire confidence, otherwise people will stop getting out and about and become more isolated. Maybe now, more than ever, people with dementia can provide experience and expertise that can help service providers to rebuild, reconfigure and reimagine journeys that help everyone to feel safe and confident.

So that’s the focus for now - wondering what on earth will journeys look like, watching what’s happening around the world as services adapt and exploring how we can we combine this with our own experience, bringing people with dementia together with service providers in new ways to help redesign journeys for the future.