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THE Health Promotion Board (HPB) will use a short film by home-grown film-maker Royston Tan in its latest campaign to raise awareness about dementia.
The film, which is about six minutes long, depicts an elderly man who continues to “feed” chickens he used to rear for sale in his kampung, even though he has been living in his HDB flat for more than 20 years. He has dementia – a condition which affects intellectual ability and causes memory loss.
The storyline in Mr Tan’s film is based on the real story of his childhood friend’s father.
Mr Tan was picked by the board as his films have a local flavour and he has a good understanding of local culture, said Ms Sng Yan Ling, a psychologist with HPB’s adult health division, who is overseeing the campaign.
Mr Tan, 33, said: “The condition of my friend’s father became quite serious last year, and I was inspired by it. We finished everything within a month as I felt a lot for my friend’s story.”
The HPB started the campaign last year after discovering in a survey that only one in 1,000 people polled could name three symptoms of the disease.
The top three warning signs are: memory loss that affects day-to-day function, difficulty doing familiar tasks, and confusion about time and place.
Of Singaporeans aged above 60, 5.2 per cent – or 22,000 – suffer from dementia.
The number of patients is expected to grow, as the risk of the disease rises with age and Singapore’s population is ageing.
Early detection can help, as patients can do activities to stay mentally active and slow the progression of the disease, Ms Sng said. It also gives family members more time to get help and organise care.
Yesterday, Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan was given a preview of the film during a visit to the Tampines branch of New Horizon Centre, a day-care centre for dementia patients run by the Alzheimer’s Disease Association (ADA). Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia.
The full-length version of the short film will be available on video-streaming website YouTube from Sept 26. For two weeks from that day, a two-minute version will be aired on Channel 8, Suria and Vasantham.
Some 20,000 DVDs of the film will also be distributed for free to the public at outlets of video retailers Poh Kim and VideoEzy, and at talks on dementia to be held from this month to November this year. For more information, visit www.hpb.gov.sg/mentalhealth
The HPB, ADA and Changi General Hospital are also developing a programme to teach caregivers how to look after dementia patients. The HPB hopes to recruit about 200 trainees for the three-year pilot programme which it plans to launch by the end of this year.
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