I will share a story from a new care place for people with dementia.
I have a friend who has dementia, which came on rather quickly and has developed fast. She is in her early 80's, and she was placed in a dementia care place at her husband's doctor's insistence, early this year. Her husband had the responsibility of her care, and he got very stressed.
When she went into care she was very good on her feet. Her main issue was anxiety. I feel they over-drugged her. She had three falls in one week, ending up with a broken collarbone, a broken vertebrae, and a hairline fracture of the hip. She is in a lot of pain, and her cries for help seem to go un-noticed.
Now when I go to visit her over lunch time, she is sleeping and has no interest in eating. When she is awake she complains of pain in her back. I am told that she does not sleep during the night!
I am wondering how that could be, when they seem to have all the drugs available to keep the patients sedated.
I feel that the place is understaffed, and the owners of the home have very little interest in the patients, and skimp on everything. There are no towels for handwiping in the toilets; there are no tissues on the tables now (there were tissues for the first few months), and they use the cheapest of tablets - the hard to swallow kind.
All is not bad. The meals they cook there are like home cooked meals, and look and smell delicious. But the patients as so 'out of it' at times that they don't enjoy them This lady ate well when she first went in there, and always ate all her midday meal. Now she will only eat a couple of mouthsful of her meal.
The decline in her appearance over a few months is dramatic!
