The Ankota Healthcare Delivery Management Blog

Best Practices for Managing Dementia/Alzheimer's in Home Care

  

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I read a piece this morning by a pastor named Anthony Robinson about his experience with his mom's dementia, and it reminded me that home care workers visit daily with people dealing with memory issues.  Here's the anecdote:

My wife and I were nervous about my 94-year-old mother's impending visit to the family cabin this summer. We had spent the weeks before she came remodeling, adding a new bathroom to the nearly 100-year-old structure built by my own grandparents. When my parents were the stewards of the cabin their policy had been to maintain the place as a kind of living museum. No changes.

The first time we steered her to the new bathroom, we held our breath. Pushing her walker across the threshold, she stopped, looked around, then said, "This is nice. This is really very nice." (Because she has short-term memory loss, each subsequent time she used the new bathroom was also the 'first' time, and every time she said, "This is very nice.")

On my mother's last day, we again steered her to the "new bathroom." "We have a new bathroom?" she asked. My wife said, "Well, next year it won't be the 'new' bathroom any longer." My mother stopped, looked up, and with sudden full clarity - and a wry smile - said, "Oh yes, it will be the 'new' bathroom for a very long time."

I learned a lot about Alzheimer's care in a lecture by Dr. Verna Benner Carson who teaches people how to become an Alzheimer's Whisperer.  Here are five tips that your caregivers can use to better deal with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia:

1. Don't Quiz, Argue or Reason
2. If at first you don't succeed, wait five minutes*
3. To combat repetition, find a "job" for the person you're caring for (such as folding towels or building with Legos(r))
4. If a loved one complains "My mom didn't have breakfast", or "Nobody has been in to see my dad today", calmly explain that that "Your mom/dad can't remember, and fill them in"*
5. Old photo albums and songs from the past are likely to connect with the patient because long-term memory lasts the longest.

*Note: Alzheimer's sufferers generally have less than 5 minutes of short-term memory, so if for example you propose a shower and get a negative response, rather than forcing the issue, you might instead wait 5 minutes and try an approach like "let's go for a nice walk but get cleaned up first."

Do you have any other tips you can share for managing Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia in the home care setting?

Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.

AgingCare.com Is In The Private Home Care Social Media Conversation

  

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Another week and another diverse and interesting batch of conversations for you to peruse!  Thanks to the many of you who have reached out and have helped me connect with others in the private care industry.  To others who may be reading this, I'd love t hear from you!  If you have any more suggestions for resources online that I should check out, let me know!

Here are this week's collections of conversations that I found online that you may want to join or to learn more about:

"Cognitive Reserve" and Dementia

AgingCare.com (Twitter handle: @AgingCare) offers this insightful article about fighting Dementia by using "cognitive reserve."  Here is a short excerpt from the article:

"Gary Small, M.D., professor of psychiatry and director of the UCLA Longevity Center, likens cognitive reserve to, "having an extra mental battery." He says that a person with a high amount of cognitive reserve can compensate, somewhat, for the brain damage caused by disease and old age."

I find the article particular fascinating.  Give it a read it and post your reactions below in our "Comments" section!

 "Facebook Is For Old People"

AgeTek.org (Twitter Handle: AgeTek) lead me to this article from Techpinions.com, regarding Facebook's recent purchase of Instagram.  It illustrates just how ephemeral "Cool" is and how that concept relates to businesses reaching out to their customers.  Businesses grow and change and social media platforms do so at an accelerated rate...Are you familiar with the newest platforms and are the leveraging the ones that your customers use the most?

Legal Issues of Social Media and Healthcare

Recommended by Healthcare 3.0 (Twitter Handle: Healthcare_3.0) comes this Article from KevinMD.com, "The Legal Landscape of Health Care Social Media."  KevinMD.com, "Social Media's leading Physician voice," offers a number of resources in different areas of the health care field.  This article gives a nice general overview as well as some Key examples of how social media is being used by the health care industry.  Do you have your own list of "Do's" and "Don'ts"?  Where do you see social media taking the health care industry in the future.  How do you feel about the direction we're going with social media? 

Please let me know if you have any blogs, articles, or other resources that you'd like to suggest to our readers.  Let's share the wealth of knowledge out there so we can all become more informed and more successful!

Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota