A typical hospital ward is ill-equipped to recognise and meet the daily needs of a dementia sufferer
By Andrea Gillies
guardian.co.uk,
17 November 2009
Four years ago I found that I had become a dementia carer, when my my mother-in-law Nancy, who has Alzheimer's, moved in. She's in care now, in a good dementia unit, but during the years she was with us, the illness transformed an articulate friendly person and attentive granny into a paranoid, hostile, ranting woman who thought herself at various times to be 28 and unmarried, or the chief executive of a large company, or the king of Scotland, and at all times to have a life somewhere else that we were conspiring to keep her from. She wasn't always physically well, but it became imperative that we try and keep her out of hospital, fearing that would be a terrible cruelty. An odd way to think, on the face of it.
A quarter of hospital beds are occupied by people over 65 with dementia. Some are there because they are ill with treatable conditions. Some for social reasons. Others, and this is less obvious, because once the transient condition that led to admission is sorted out, they're not felt to be well enough to leave. NHS staff don't always understand that people live their lives with dementia, and that this is as well as they're ever going to be.
Hospitals run on information and on chain of command. They depend on patients speaking up. I've heard many stories from other carers about dearly loved parents rapidly losing weight and hope in wards, left sitting in their own faeces, distressed and misunderstood. It's horrifying that elderly people should be discharged from hospital in a much worse physical state than when they went in, but that's what's happening, as this week's release of a survey by the Alzheimer's Society reveals.
Abridged
SOURCE: The Guardian, UK
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