My family and I are really struggling with recent violent behaviour and feeling incredibly misunderstood by medical staff.
My grandmother has recently been placed in a care home after 8 weeks in hospital following a fall that caused a brain bleed and 6 weeks in a temporary nursing home due to a stage 4 bed sore.
During her hospital stay she became verbally aggressive which has progressed since joining the care home to become physical aggression and violence. This is incredibly out of character, she has never been violent at all but her entire worldview seems to have changed and she is now constantly lashing out at staff and other residents. She has become restless and had another fall on her first night there and was taken to hospital but later discharged.
I feel as though both the staff at the new care home and at A&E don’t seem to know how to respond to this behaviour and seem to be treating her as though they’ve never encountered aggression before. This is all incredibly new and distressing to us, when I have researched later stages of dementia online it seems to be a common occurrence in advanced cases however we’ve had little reassurance from the care home/doctors and feel as though she’s being ‘othered’ and treated as though she’s an abstract case.
I entirely understand how distressing this is for HCA’s and nurses that have to deal with this whilst trying to protect other patients and themselves but we feel entirely out of our depth. It’s worth noting my grandmother is incredibly frail and her memory/ concept of reality have entirely gone. Nurses keep asking us to explain to her she can’t hit or ask us to talk to her about it but she doesn’t understand or forgets within seconds. One of the family goes in to visit her every day to try and take pressure of of staff and also to spend time with her but we feel as though we’re being told off every time we step foot in the home.
The home she is in specialises in ‘advanced’ dementia so I guess I’m just feeling incredibly confused as to why everyone keeps looking to us for answers and why the only reassurance I’ve had that this is sadly a possibility in the later stages seems to have come from online resources.
Has anyone else ever felt entirely unsupported in this situation? What can we do to help her? How can we work with staff to try and mitigate this?
My grandmother has recently been placed in a care home after 8 weeks in hospital following a fall that caused a brain bleed and 6 weeks in a temporary nursing home due to a stage 4 bed sore.
During her hospital stay she became verbally aggressive which has progressed since joining the care home to become physical aggression and violence. This is incredibly out of character, she has never been violent at all but her entire worldview seems to have changed and she is now constantly lashing out at staff and other residents. She has become restless and had another fall on her first night there and was taken to hospital but later discharged.
I feel as though both the staff at the new care home and at A&E don’t seem to know how to respond to this behaviour and seem to be treating her as though they’ve never encountered aggression before. This is all incredibly new and distressing to us, when I have researched later stages of dementia online it seems to be a common occurrence in advanced cases however we’ve had little reassurance from the care home/doctors and feel as though she’s being ‘othered’ and treated as though she’s an abstract case.
I entirely understand how distressing this is for HCA’s and nurses that have to deal with this whilst trying to protect other patients and themselves but we feel entirely out of our depth. It’s worth noting my grandmother is incredibly frail and her memory/ concept of reality have entirely gone. Nurses keep asking us to explain to her she can’t hit or ask us to talk to her about it but she doesn’t understand or forgets within seconds. One of the family goes in to visit her every day to try and take pressure of of staff and also to spend time with her but we feel as though we’re being told off every time we step foot in the home.
The home she is in specialises in ‘advanced’ dementia so I guess I’m just feeling incredibly confused as to why everyone keeps looking to us for answers and why the only reassurance I’ve had that this is sadly a possibility in the later stages seems to have come from online resources.
Has anyone else ever felt entirely unsupported in this situation? What can we do to help her? How can we work with staff to try and mitigate this?
