MOVING stories of how Bradford families have coped with dementia throughout the pandemic have been shared in a new short film.

Commissioned by Dementia Friendly Keighley and Bradford2025 MAKE:FILM, the film hears from a number of people who were separated from loved ones with Alzheimers and Dementia in care homes.

For Keighley filmmaker Scott Coulthard, it was a subject close to his heart as he learns how to cope with his grandmothers' memory loss.

Reflecting on the experience, he said: "The interviews were really emotional. When you go along to these things and people are talking about something so raw, you never know how emotional it's going to get. They were all incredible."

Dawn Hargreaves made the decision to move her husband, David, into a care home permanently before Covid. While waiting for an assessment, the UK was thrown into a national lockdown and David, who has Alzheimers, caught the virus.

Four days after he fell ill David was admitted to Airedale Hospital.

Dawn said: "They said he wouldn't be able to cope with the ventilation so they were just giving him as much oxygen as they could. Then I got a phone call from one of the doctors asking whether I've considered palliative care, which was a massive shock."

Miraculously David made a recovery and returned to Sutton Lodge. But while he had beaten Covid-19, his memory loss had worsened.

"He didn't have a clue who we were," Dawn said.

"It was such a shock. He'd lost so much weight. He couldn't lift his head up to look at you. He didn't know where he was."

Mental health nurse Rebecca Templeman dealt with the first case at her care home in May 2020 - a time when people were not tested before they were moved.

Rebecca told Scott: "Once it was in the home, it seemed to go through the residents quite rapidly. We had quite a lot of people die at that point. It was just the worst time really.

"We're having to do more of the things that families would do, we're having to hug people, spend more time with people. The masks play a massive part. It comes across as a barrier to us because the people with dementia don't understand why we've got this thing on our face and quite a few people sometimes try and grab it and pick it off.

"We're doing a lot more video calls. They see their loved one on the screen and they can't work it out. They look behind the screen or they're pointing and they just walk off because they can't process that information.

"There was a guy who was dying and we had to do the final goodbyes with the family on a video. There were lots of very upsetting moments."

You can watch the full video on the Facebook page, Scott Coulthard Video, or via t.ly/HPus