Care
How can you find helpful, reliable and appropriate care for your parent, wherever they choose to live?
Tips on making the move into care a little bit easier
Sometimes the move into care is carefully planned. Sometimes it happens in an emergency. We asked Sonia Hamilton-Martin of Worplesdon View Care Home for advice on how to make the process as pain free as possible. Making choices about favoured care/nursing homes before they’re needed, if they’re needed, means that in an emergency everyone knows […]
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Tips on getting the right care at home
Care at home isn’t just about basic tasks. It’s also about preserving our parents’ personal independence for as long as possible. There are a whole range of support services that can help our parents to continue enjoying life in their own home. We asked Paul Westgarth of daily care provider Home Instead Senior Care to […]
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Finding good care for older relatives
This week’s storyteller is Andrea Sutcliffe, Chief Executive of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE). At some point we may well need to find carers for our parents in their own homes, or a residential home elsewhere. Andrea talks about her personal experience of care choices for her family and how the SCIE’s new […]
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Expectations in dementia care
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous. It’s hard to know what to demand from a care home or how to achieve it. A daughter rates her mother’s experience. Alzheimer’s Society chief executive Jeremy Hughes told the BBC recently: “Society has such low expectations of care homes that people are settling for average. Throughout […]
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Tips for choosing a care home
Written by Rebecca Lenton Sarah Guthrie, the daughter of Wing Commander Branse Burbridge, talks through her family’s choice of care home for her mum and dad and offers advice on choosing the right place for your elderly parent. As my dad’s Alzheimer’s worsened he went into a care home in Oxford, where my parents lived, […]
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Who matters in the care home?
Written by Kathy Lawrence How one group of experts is aiming to encourage good practice in care homes. A buzz term you may increasingly come across when you’re researching care homes is “patient-centric care” or its stable-mate “patient-centred care”. It’s all about involving patients and their families in decisions about how residents receive their care. […]
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Visiting grandparents in their new care home
If your parent has moved into a care home, should you take your children to visit? And if you do, how do you prepare them for the change in environment? In an ideal world your children will find that their grandparent has simply moved home. That they’re much the same as they ever were, but […]
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How to prepare for your parent moving in
While moving your parent in isn’t for everyone there are those of us who would rather they were close to home so we can keep a watchful eye on their health than face the prospect of being unable to help because we live further afield. If your parent’s health worsens or perhaps they’re struggling with […]
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Why my parents never came to live with me
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous. We’ve asked many people about their experiences of living with their parents in later life. In our latest story, our storyteller explains why she didn’t make that offer. Why didn’t my parents move in with me when they needed help? I didn’t invite them and they wouldn’t […]
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Gaining new freedom by moving in together
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous and names have been changed. It was a tough decision, but Sally’s move to the UK from her native South Africa to live with her son and his fiancée has given her renewed independence. I live with my fiancée Carter and his mother, Sally, who’s in her […]
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