So after a rocky start Mum appeared to settle in her care home but about a month ago her symptoms and behaviour began to worsen. She is extremely agitated and, I believe in a state of great anxiety, leading to her acting aggressively. The home is not coping well with this and do not have the staff for 1:1 care. Yesterday her condition was so bad that an ambulance was called and I feared she would be hospitalised before I could arrive. This didn't happen and she appears to have slept last night and will be visited by GP sometime today. The home are talking about serving notice on her - they have said she requires EMI nursing care and also talked about a referral for CHC funding (which I understand is very hard to obtain). I am currently waiting for a report on the GP visit but am wondering what my action should be in this situation? Mum is self funding at the moment and has a property currently on the market which will fund several years of care. She did have a social worker review at the end of last year which concluded that she should not be moved but her condition has certainly deteriorated since Christmas. So I could contact the social worker again. There seem to be a lot of things swirling round among all this. Have arrived at work today with bag packed in case I have to do the train journey up north this evening.
I was in a similar situation last year with my dad, the first care home he went into said just after 2 weeks they could not cope with dad and said they had reached crisis point and wanted dad to be moved. Even though dad was self funding we still had a SW, so she quickly became involved and became the mediator between myself and the home. She organised the Mental Health team to come and do an assessment of dad and he was put on some medication to try to calm his behaviour and I had to agree until dad could be moved, to paying for a one to one agency nurse to be appointed for 8 hours a day to be with dad until I could find him a new more suitable care home.
It took me approximately 3 weeks to find a more suitable Dementia+ care home which dealt with residents with challenging behaviour, the staff ratio was much better and the unit only had a maximum of 18 rooms. The difference in care homes and how much more specialised the staff were with dealing with Dementia patients was immediately obvious. After my experience with the first care home, I became much better at judging the care homes I viewed and I also knew more about how my dad would react to being in care, this enable me to be totally open and tell them how he was and ask how they would deal with it.
I too was told that dad could potentially qualify for CHC funding based on his challenging behaviour and lack of cognition and communication skills. The SW agreed that after dad had settled into the new care home for 4 weeks she would do the initial assessment. This proved positive and she put him forward for the full assessment. The CHC assessment team came out to do the assessment and they also agreed and dad was awarded full funding, this was back in June last year and they came out again in October to do their 3 month review and they still said he qualified. It helps if you have a care home with experience of CHC funding and are willing to keep good detailed records, ie an ABC chart.
You also may find if you have to place your mum in a more specialised Dementia care home, it may be more expensive, the care home my dad went into was almost double the cost of the first care home and would have been more expensive if the SW hadn't helped us and got the care home to agree to accept us on the LA rate. I'm just saying this as sometimes SW's can be very helpful, my dad's proved invaluable.
Good luck.
Elle x