carer
In praise of district nurses
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous.When the chips are down, district nurses can be relied upon to take the time and effort to care for our elderly and ill parents at home. At 25 minutes to 1 on Monday we received a phone call from a district nurse to say that dad was […]
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More questions to ask when choosing a care home
By Kathy Lawrence How can you really get under the skin of a care home to know if it’s going to work for your parent? There’s plenty of advice on general questions to ask but here are a few more thoughts for you to consider. These questions are based on the experiences of my family […]
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Four questions to ask a new live-in carer to start building a relationship
Inviting a stranger into the home to provide live-in care can be daunting. Where do you start to build a comfortable relationship between carer and person receiving care? Chris Turner of live-in care provider Notaro Live in Care offers some useful questions that a care recipient can ask their new carer in order to start […]
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How to keep your parent safe and prevent wandering
Wandering can be a common problem as our parents get older and perhaps have mental health challenges to cope with. Dementia is often the cause of wandering in later life which brings its own difficulties in terms of managing your parent’s safety and independence. Whether your parent has developed a tendency to wander away from […]
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What to expect from live-in care for your parent
For most of our parents the thought of leaving their own home for a life in care can be nightmarish. Moving into a care home is often seen as one of life’s grim realities and this association can mean our parents avoid thinking about care possibilities until it’s too late. Rebecca Sibley, from Christies Care […]
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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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Caring for a father with Parkinson’s
This week’s storyteller is Chris. Chris tells the sad story of his brilliant father’s degeneration due to Parkinson’s, and how the family managed his care with love and respect. My father at 83 started to become very slow, and slightly doddery, and for him that was not normal. He was a very smart, neat and […]
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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 caring from a distance
Helping parents who don’t live just round the corner is more complicated, but there are many things that we can do to ease their situation. Sally offers some tips gleaned from her experience of supporting a mother with physical needs and a father with mental challenges, both at the same time. It is possible to […]
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