The Alzheimer’s murder mystery used to train NHS staff is coming to Liverpool

The show, Forget Me Not – The Alzheimer’s Whodunnit is being shown to NHS staff for training on ethics and reporting concerns.

Forget Me Not – The Alzheimer’s Whodunnit is the creation of Leicester-based comic, poet and psychiatric nurse Rob Gee, who plays fifteen characters delivering a series of clues, plot twists and red herrings.

It’s based on his experiences as a nurse on a “challenging behaviour” ward for people with late stage dementia, the treatment of whom he reported to the NHS: the same organisation he now trains staff for.

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Jim’s wife, a patient on a dementia ward, has died from what appears to be natural causes. Jim is a retired police detective and he smells a rat. He’s determined to solve one last murder. The problem is he also has dementia. It is a case worthy of the greatest detective mind. But his will have to do.

Rob spent twelve years working as a registered nurse in inpatient settings around the UK and Australia, before becoming a writer and performer. He’s performed with Jo Brand, Harold Pinter, Sue Townsend, Sarah Millican and Jimmy Carr. He’s won over twenty international awards for his solo shows and regularly appears on BBC Radio.

By turns hilarious and thought-provoking, this is a one man comedy poetry theatre show with a lot to say about how we treat and perceive people withdementia. So much that, since seeing it, the NHS have now recruited Rob to use the show for training clinical staff on ethics and reporting concerns. This has been an entirely new form of training, with 93% of participants saying they would recommend it to a colleague.

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Rob explains:“I was there as a student nurse in this really bad ward around twenty years ago and I left under a bit of a cloud after reporting what I saw.Much has improved since then, but the people with the worst memories are always at risk of being the most forgotten about. I also wanted to write arattlingly good murder mystery and I didn’t think these two things were mutually exclusive.”