Supporting people that live with dementia is one of the greatest health and social care challenges of modern times. Today, around 850,000 people in the UK have dementia, a figure expected to reach at least a million by 2025 and 2 million by 2051. In fact, 225,000 people will be diagnosed with dementia this year – that’s one person every three minutes.
If you’ve spent any time away from a conventional office in the last decade and then returned, you will have noticed a big difference. Here we look at how our living and working spaces are crossing over and what this means for design.
We’ve known for some time that noise pollution is a real and measurable problem, one with equally real and measurable impact on our wellbeing. But new research points towards the damage noise pollution has on nature – reopening the debate around its effect on humans.
It’s normal for all of us to be exposed to noise that annoys us from time-to-time. The neighbour whose TV is always on full blast, the work colleague who eats their lunch too loudly, or the builders down the road drilling from the crack of dawn.
If we look at the research around mental health in the workplace, we realise how much of an issue it is – and why it’s so important to address it. Statistics show 526,000 workers suffered from work related stress in 2016/17, which accounted for 12.5 million working days lost, and one in four people in the UK will have a mental health problem at some point in their life (1).
When we think about creating a comfortable home, we may think of getting the air temperature right and the amount of light we can see. But safety and security can play a huge role too – especially when it comes to our wellbeing.
