The woman who harnessed the HEALING POWER OF THE SPA

Her luxury hotel is the first to use beauty treatments to soothe the minds of dementia sufferers — with extraordinary results. Meet . . .

By the time Sarah tester’s mother was diagnosed with vascular dementia, she had started to forget her grown- up daughter’s face. Instead, she inhabited the world as it was 40 years ago, when Sarah was a toddler.

‘Sometimes she’d talk to me and tell me about myself, having no idea that I was sitting there with her. She’d say: “I’m having real trouble with my little girl at the moment because she’s not sleeping.” ’

For Sarah, one of the saddest parts of her mother’s decline was that she — the daughter who did most of the caring — was the person most frequently forgotten.

‘Mum tended to remember other family members but not me. I was probably the closest to her out of the whole family, and the one who looked after her, but I was the one she didn’t know. I know she couldn’t help it — she was living in a different era — but it was hurtful.’

there was one thing Sarah and her mother did together, however, that never failed to put them both in a better mood, often for days at a time.

A gentle walk around the spa where Sarah worked, sometimes with a hand massage and a spell sitting in the sunshine in the glorious grounds, seemed to calm her mother’s anxiety and distract her from repetitive behaviour.

‘She loved to be taken to the spa,’ said Sarah. ‘Most of all, she liked sitting in the gardens, which are english heritage-listed and very beautiful. But it was the atmosphere, too, the calm of it all. her symptoms definitely improved when we were there.’

It made Sarah aware for the first time of the potential of spa treatments to help people with dementia. eventually it would lead, in part, to a whole new direction at the upmarket Lifehouse Spa & hotel in thorpe-le-Soken, near Frinton in essex, where she is now finance director.

A pretty seaside town where 45 per cent of the population are retired, Frinton is precisely the kind of place to be most affected by the rising number of people living with dementia.

Although dementia rates are falling — by 15 per cent every ten years since 1988 according to research — 850,000 people have the condition in the UK according to the Alzheimer’s Society.

At the Lifehouse, it wasn’t just Sarah who was caring for an affected relative. Several other staff members had similar experiences, including the former director of the spa, whose father was ill. they knew what eased their loved ones’ symptoms, but they’d also witnessed the stigma attached to the condition.

‘Out in public, at shops or restaurants, people with dementia are often seen as a nuisance or in the way,’ says Sue Davies, wellness director at the spa.

‘People have no patience for them. they tut if they’re slow, or even get cross. there certainly seemed to be very little empathy in public places for Mum,’ agrees Sarah.

‘having said that, if you don’t have experience of it, the behaviour can seem really difficult. Mum would have a drink for example, put down the empty cup, and immediately say: “Can I have a drink? I’m thirsty.”

‘you’d say: “But Mum, you’ve just had one.” But she’d keep on asking and this could go on for two or three hours. the point is, it’s much easier to stay patient if you understand the condition.’

It was in that spirit of awareness-raising that the spa called in the Alzheimer’s Society to train therapists to recognise symptoms and become ‘Dementia Friends’.