Hop on the bus to experience what it's like having dementia and find out more about what is being done locally to raise awareness of the condition.

Home Instead Welwyn and Hatfield will be working alongside Herts Ability on a Virtual Dementia Bus event on Wednesday May 18 outside the main entrance of The Howard Centre in Welwyn Garden City.

They will also be running a three-day information event inside the shopping centre from May 18-20, part of this year's Dementia Action Week.

Medically and scientifically proven, the Virtual Dementia Bus was invented 25 years ago in the USA by PK Beville who is president of American non-profit company Second Wind Dreams. It aims to give people with healthy brains an experience as close as possible to what it's like living with dementia.

Home Instead Welwyn and Hatfield dementia trainer Jane Andrews said: “With an ageing population cases of dementia are increasing. This means that more and more people in our local area will unfortunately be affected at some point in their lives.

"Both Home Instead and Herts Ability hope that by educating the local community, we can create superior dementia awareness through positive social interaction they can drive their mission to create a ‘better’ dementia friendly community.

"By walking in the shoes of a person living with a dementia condition, hopefully, our community may start to understand the issues that they experience every day. You will experience being confused, isolated, lost, intimidated, vulnerable, and much more and therefore understand what you need to change to improve quality of care.

"The aim of the mobile unit is to remove a person from their known environment into a controlled, safe place to complete a dementia experience. Why not pop along?"

There are more than 940,000 people living with dementia in the UK today and this is forecast to soar to 1.7 million by 2050. One in three people over the age of 65 will die from the condition, but there are also 16,000 people under this age with dementia in the UK.

Visit www.homeinstead/welwyn for further information.