Care
How can you find helpful, reliable and appropriate care for your parent, wherever they choose to live?
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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And Fred came too: the struggle to care for a grieving step-parent
This week’s storyteller is Barbara. When Barbara’s mother passed away, Barbara was left to care for her mother’s second husband who stayed on in the granny flat. Despite Barbara’s best efforts, it was hard to make the relationship work. My father died 33 years ago, and eventually Mummy met and married Fred, who was some […]
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How tradition makes living with dad the obvious choice
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous. Their cultural background made the decision to share a home with a widowed parent easy for one family. Our storyteller explains how the arrangement works and its ups and downs. My husband and I married 14 years ago. For the first 5 years of our married life […]
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Ups and downs of moving mum in
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous. One of our readers tells us how her mum moved from Zimbabwe to live in the family home in the UK at the age of seventy-six. Seven years on, she talks about why it happened and how well it’s working. And we asked her husband what he […]
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