Staff at a Warrnambool aged care home had never heard Noeleen speak, and then she did

Noeleen was a market researcher who ran her own business. Then came a stroke, which took her speech, and after it vascular dementia, where thinking and reasoning and memory go because the blood is not reaching the brain properly. By the time she arrived at Mercy Place in Warrnambool there were staff working on her floor who had never heard her say anything at all.

That is no longer true. "Some of us had not heard her speak and then suddenly she's saying words," said Bev Stutchbury, the home's lifestyle coordinator. "That in itself is heartwarming."

A screen you touch

What changed was a piece of equipment called Brain Trainer Plus, a large touchscreen loaded with games and pictures, which arrived as part of a run of new gear the home has taken on in the last three to six months. Her husband Peter says it makes her focus, gets her thinking, gives her something to enjoy and keeps her hands working. Through using it, her cognition has improved and she has started speaking again.

Peter is precise about what it replaced. Before the most recent stroke, he said, the two of them would get the wheelchair out once a week and go to lunch at a cafe, or shopping, or to a film, or to the café at Deakin University to sit with the art books in the library afterwards. "Now she is in the princess chair," he said, "having access to the Brain Trainer Plus goes some way to replacing these lost activities."

Fifteen minutes in Dublin

The home also has virtual reality goggles, which take a person to somewhere from their own life rather than somewhere invented. Stutchbury tried them on Peter and Noeleen together.

"They went to Dublin on a holiday and so we were able to take them both back there for about 15 minutes," she said. "He said it was beautiful because they could both feel like they'd travelled back again. You could tell she was interacting. It was just nice to see."

Most of the residents come from south-west Victoria, so the same goggles put farmers back in the dairy at milking time.

The rest of it

None of this is only the equipment. The home writes up a snapshot of each resident's life and puts it outside their room, so that anyone walking in knows what they did and what they care about and has something real to open with. There are sensory boxes made up for individuals, with photographs and objects from their own past in them, to bring memory back and keep hands busy. There is a letterbox, so residents have a reason to write letters and somewhere to post them.

And there is music, which Stutchbury rates above all of it. "Music's a huge superfood," she said. "We see people that are completely non-verbal and as soon as the music comes on their feet are tapping, their hands are tapping, their lips are moving."

A dementia specialist from Melbourne told the staff that Mercy Place was one of the best memory support environments they had seen. Stutchbury's own summary of why it works is shorter than that. "We need to focus on the person that's living with the condition as opposed to the condition," she said. "They're still a person, they've just got a disease."

Asked what he would say to someone about to start caring for a partner with dementia, Peter said this: be aware that your loved one's personality is not completely gone, and that there are activities, music and games among them, that can light them up and bring joy to both of you.