Choosing a Care Home
New book - Care Homes; When, Why and How to Choose a Care Home by June Andrews is out now
Picking a Care Home for yourself or for somebody else
Make decisions for your care in advance
Care Homes; When, Why and How to Choose a Care Home
This month will see the publication of Care Homes; When, Why and How to Choose a Care Home. It’s a one stop guide. Each day I’ll be releasing a few pages through my blog. If you want to read the whole book you can pre-order here at amazon and please subscribe to my newsletter to get updates on my work in supporting people affected by dementia.
The main part of the book is about everyday things. It’s about working out what you need, getting the resources organised and practical stuff that needs to be sorted out. At the start it says that choosing a care home is one of the most emotional and expensive decisions you’ll ever make. I talk about the financial costs in Chapter 10, but here I talk about the emotional costs.
There are two readers to address here: the person who is deciding about a care home for their own future; and someone who is deciding it for someone else.
Deciding for yourself
If you are looking into this for yourself, you are doing the right thing – not enough people think about it early enough. Thinking about it doesn’t mean that you have to go to a care home, but if that day comes, then your decision will have been thoughtful and you’ll be making the best of things. The main message for you is that a good care home can be the reward for a life well spent. You can live in comfort, knowing that in addition to any friends or family, there are new people around you who will care for you, and care about you. Life’s daily worries will be taken care of. It’s time to relax and enjoy yourself.
“It’s like being a student again. When I went up to university seventy years ago, I had a room of my own for the first time in my life. A cleaner changed the sheets and did some dusting once a week. I filled the shelves with books and got myself a record player and I could read and listen to music to my heart’s content, and then go to talk to other people if I felt like it, and eat in the student refectory. I used to think they were the happiest days of my life. But here I am again in my own room. Not a lot of space for books or records, but now I’ve got an Alexa, and my Kindle with large print, and I can talk to people on my iPad. And my own shower room. I’m maybe in God’s waiting room, but this is a little bit of heaven already. I’m so happy here.”
Deciding for someone else
For those people who make the decision for someone else, it can also have a good outcome.
I’ve talked this through with my daughter. I told her I want to stay independent for as long as possible, but a day might come when I don’t realise I need to go in a home and when that comes, no matter what I’m saying, I want her to see to it and find a nice one. If I’ve got dementia or something and I don’t even know who she is, I don’t even want her to visit, unless she really feels she has to, for her own sake. Just as long as she checks up that everything is OK. I’ve been saying this to her since she was a teenager. She got power of attorney then and it’s all sorted, and I know how it’ll be paid for. (Eleanor, 56 and in great good health)
If you talk to Eleanor’s daughter, she’ll tell you that it was very hard when her mother started these conversations. As an only child, she really didn’t want to contemplate the day when she’d have to say goodbye to her parents for the last time. It made her cry to think of it, to begin with. But it’s part of growing up – it’s part of life.
Some children are not so lucky.
“My mother always said that she would never want to go into a nursing home. She got really ill and frail in her eighty-ninth year and, after some months in hospital, my partner and I brought her home to my house. After thirteen weeks of sleepless nights, I couldn’t go on anymore. I had to tell her that we were moving her to a nursing home. I’ll never forget the turn of her head when she looked away from me.”
Tough decisions – how they affect you
If you have children and you love them, please tell them now that you accept that whether or not you go into a nursing home at the end of life is a hard decision for someone, sometime in the future. Tell them this, even if you are forty and they are twenty years old. If you are ninety, it is still not too late. Tell them you’d rather not go, if humanly possible, but you recognise that these things can happen and you’ll have to live with it. It might even be fun. It is the cruellest end to a loving relationship if the parent places a burden on her child that the child cannot carry. Just don’t do that. You are better than that.
If you would like more information, you can buy my book Dementia, the One Stop Guide or Care Homes: When, Why and How to Choose a Care Home. I am available for consultancy for families or organisations. And if you have any further queries or questions, or suggestions for something you’d like to see me write on, please contact me via the Contact Page
See my new course on Dementia the One Stop Guide on Policy Hub here
