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About Us

RDS - Rare Dementia Support Canada - Advice, Community, Learning

Rare Dementia Support Canada provides a continuous and tailored specialist support community for people who are living with, affected by or at risk of, a diagnosis of rare dementia. We currently support people affected by:

  • young onset Alzheimer’s disease
  • familial Alzheimer’s disease
  • frontotemporal dementia
  • familial frontotemporal dementia
  • progressive primary aphasia
  • posterior cortical atrophy
  • Lewy body dementia

Our services are delivered online so we can connect with people living across Canada, no matter where you live. If you are not online for any reason, we can connect with you using the telephone. We are currently open Monday to Friday, 8:30am – 4:30pm (EST). However, we are flexible for people living in other time zones.

Our Vision

RDS Canada’s vision is for everyone affected by rare dementia to have access to the right information, tailored and continuous support and to have connection with others affected by similar conditions in a space of mutual respect and understanding.

Our primary goal is to offer information and advice, develop a support community of people with lived experience and dedicated practitioners and engage in ongoing learning about what support works and when it works best.

Two people talking

Advice

We provide information on topics such as relationships, legal and financial matters, care and support, safety and more through our website and our support personnel.

Advice

Community

Our support team currently offers one-to-one family and group support. Support is often tailored according to a disease/condition (e.g., PCA), age or stage (e.g., later stages and end-of-life care), relationship to the person living with dementia (e.g., spousal care partner, teenage children) and other dedicated support spaces (e.g., 2SLGBTQI). Sometimes we include guests to help us understand more about particular topic areas. We also offer smaller group conversations on specific topics (e.g., supporting children and young people, maintaining social connectedness, navigating family celebrations, sensory engagement in later stages). A schedule of our groups can be found in our Member Area.

If your support needs fall outside the scope of RDS Canada (e.g., medical treatment, crisis intervention, psychological interventions), we can direct you to a relevant health care provider.

To access support from us, you will need to register your membership online.

Community
Woman at laptop with notepad

Learning

At RDS Canada, we work in partnership with other dementia services to provide education and develop educational resources for rare dementia. Practitioners should register with us to access educational opportunities or request advice or training about a specific type of rare dementia.

We also host students who are studying medicine, social work, nursing, psychology or other careers for clinical or field education.

Our team is also continually engaged in research to learn more about the design, delivery and impact of rare dementia support. More information on our current work is found on our research page. If you are interested in learning more about our research or participating in one of our studies, you can contact us at rdscanada@nipissingu.ca.

Learning
Hilary & Galen Weston Foundation

We are led by Nipissing University through a generous donation from The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation. Our support community is delivered by a team of support practitioners in partnership with Rare Dementia Support in the UK.

The University sits on the territory of Nipissing First Nation, the territory of the Anishnabek, within lands protected by the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850.