While there are specialist residential services for people with dementia, many are cared for at home by family members – often, as in this case, an elderly spouse. When this photograph was taken in 2010, Bev (76) had been suffering from dementia for three years, and had been cared for at home by her husband, John (85). Her dementia had been severe for the previous year: she suffered memory loss and occasional hallucinations. The couple praised support services but commented that reactions from family members were sometimes difficult to deal with.
Listen to geriatrician Maree Todd respond to the question of when to seek help when caring for a family member with dementia.
Transcript
I think the red flags to me are where people are having lots of medical problems and are starting to lose the ability to do basic day-to-day tasks like prepare their meals properly, go shopping, losing their ability to drive or get out of the house, falls, incontinence, problems with memory. Those are all flags that need and explanation and an assessment.
Interviewer: You know if the person is living away from their family then it's going to be hard for some of those things to become obvious, you know, what they're cooking how they're cooking.
Well often they're more easily apparent to the visiting daughter from afar when you come in and you suddenly see quite a change in mother whereas if you seeing somebody day to day the changes can be so incrementally slow that you both adjust to it. And the same with GPs sometimes you know, GPs and their patients grow older together and so sometimes a fresh pair of eyes that come in from afar is the first alert system that we have cos somebody sees that, oh, mother's not nearly as good as they were six months ago.
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
by Peter McIntosh
Soundfile courtesy of Family Care Radio.
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