My mother has Alzheimer's and following many years of being at home with family support, we finally had to make the decision for permanent placement in a care home following a fracture.
As I am sure you will all appreciate it is a very difficult decision to make. Once the family had decided on which care home, we then lived in hope that mum would soon settle. It is still early days and too soon to tell.
My real reason for this post is to share my experience on what I would do differently. Mum had not been in the care home very long when it came to our attention by chance, rather than being informed, that the care home had initiated deregistration from mum's GP, by the time we knew anything about this it had already occurred. My mother had a wonderful GP who has been very caring and supportive over many years and I knew that mum would never want to change GP. It is a systematic approach and one I found very upsetting and unacceptable.
I did not realise that when we selected the care home we were selecting a new GP for mum and I feel I have let her down. In hind sight I feel I should have established which care homes mum's GP covered and if possible select one of those. When people enter a care home, they are generally in the final years of their life, is it too much to ask for them to have the continuity of their GP. They seem to be treated in the same way as someone who moves house and out of catchment.
I am already thinking about my own old age and what I can put in place now for myself in case the day comes when I no longer have an input to my welfare.
As I am sure you will all appreciate it is a very difficult decision to make. Once the family had decided on which care home, we then lived in hope that mum would soon settle. It is still early days and too soon to tell.
My real reason for this post is to share my experience on what I would do differently. Mum had not been in the care home very long when it came to our attention by chance, rather than being informed, that the care home had initiated deregistration from mum's GP, by the time we knew anything about this it had already occurred. My mother had a wonderful GP who has been very caring and supportive over many years and I knew that mum would never want to change GP. It is a systematic approach and one I found very upsetting and unacceptable.
I did not realise that when we selected the care home we were selecting a new GP for mum and I feel I have let her down. In hind sight I feel I should have established which care homes mum's GP covered and if possible select one of those. When people enter a care home, they are generally in the final years of their life, is it too much to ask for them to have the continuity of their GP. They seem to be treated in the same way as someone who moves house and out of catchment.
I am already thinking about my own old age and what I can put in place now for myself in case the day comes when I no longer have an input to my welfare.