'Empower independence': Sharing the Care Expo showcasing support services

At an expo held in Punchbowl on May 7, participants were able to experience this and more - all in the name of support and education.

The Sharing the Care Expo, hosted by Community Care Tasmania (CCT), was held to help people with a disability or in aged care to live independently, and provide information to carers and family.

CCT community engagement officer Ashley Leonard said the idea of the expo was to showcase local businesses and organisations and educate people on the many support services available.

"Everyone's here today as a way to empower independence for people living with disability, or people in aged care supports," she said.

"A lot of people don't realise what's out there in terms of organisations.

"We want to build a network so that if we can't provide a service, we can go 'hey, you can go to so-and-so as they provide that service as well' or 'they do something maybe we don't do'."

She said having so many exhibitors in one space offered a great starting point for people to find organisations that offer the support services they might need.

"We ... really made sure that we veered in and gave an even scope [of exhibitors] across both aged care and disability," Ms Leonard said.

This year was CCT's second expo and Ms Leonard said they decided to focus more on CCT's involvement with the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

"We really wanted to go a little bit harder on the NDIS side of things, because a lot of people don't know Community Care does NDIS services," she said.

"We really made sure that we veered in and gave an even scope [of exhibitors] across both age and disability."

The Dementia Australia stall offered a virtual reality experience where users saw the world through the eyes of a person living with dementia, through a character named EDIE.

Dementia Australia support specialist Amanda Irving said the experience provided two scenarios of EDIE's life at home.

"One is the difficulties that he faces ... while performing activities," Ms Irving said.

"You get to see and hear what happens to EDIE when he gets up to go to the toilet in the night.

"The second is after some changes have been made to communications and the home environment [showing] the difference that those small changes can make to EDIE's experience."

Ms Irving said the expo was a one-stop shop for people.

"I think that there's a good spread of representation across aged care across disability care, but also some things that people may not have thought about," she said.

"From our perspective, a lot of these services and a lot of the things that we're going to talk about actually impact on your risk for dementia as well.

"Everything is interrelated."

Many people who visited their exhibit expressed concerns about family members having trouble with their memory.

"We've just been generally chatting to them about how we might be able to help ... because dementia affects things other than memory as well," Ms Irving said.

There were 50 exhibitors at the expo, which was held at Punchbowl Christian Centre.