Dementia care at home

Consistency is the intervention

For a person with dementia, an unfamiliar caregiver is not a minor inconvenience: it is a stranger in the house. Every visit starts again from nothing, and the resistance that follows gets recorded as “difficult behaviour” when it is in fact a completely reasonable response.

So we keep dementia care to a small, consistent team, and we write down the small specifics: which chair, which mug, that she is called Bea and not Beatrice, that the radio helps and the television does not.

Behaviour is communication

Almost every difficult moment in dementia care is a person trying to express something with a vocabulary that has been taken from them. Pain. Needing the toilet. Too much noise. Too many questions at once. Fear of the bathroom because the tiles look like a hole in the floor.

We ask caregivers to work out what a behaviour is for before trying to stop it. Arguing with a false belief reliably makes things worse; joining the person where they are, and gently moving on, reliably makes things better.

Sundowning, and the hours families dread

Late afternoon is when confusion and agitation peak, and it is also when family caregivers are most depleted. A caregiver covering 3pm to 7pm, the specific hours that are hardest, can change what an entire household’s day feels like, at a fraction of the cost of round-the-clock care.

Talk to the Alzheimer Society too

The Alzheimer Society of B.C. runs a First Link support line, education sessions and support groups across the province, free of charge. They are excellent, and we recommend them to every family, whether or not they hire us. Their support and ours do different jobs.