Hi,
My 79 year old mum has a long-overdue appointment with her GP coming up, to start the ball rolling towards a dementia diagnosis. To cut a very long story short, she has shown signs of memory problems and other symptoms for the past four years and has been referred once already to the memory clinic, last Feb...but the referral was lost . It took three months for that to come to light, by which time my parents were just starting a house move north to be close to me, so it was decided to wait. Now that move has been completed and the appointment has been made. However in the interim months, Mum has deteriorated more rapidly and amongst other things, has lost most of her ability to communicate - now she hardly speaks, she can't seem to find the words for what she wants to say, and what she does say is very hard to understand. So I think it's unlikely that any of the standard memory assessments will be much use, and was wondering what they might do instead. Or whether the new GP will just not attempt a new assessment and simply use what is in her record from Feb to do a fresh referral? Does anyone have any experience of this situation?
My 79 year old mum has a long-overdue appointment with her GP coming up, to start the ball rolling towards a dementia diagnosis. To cut a very long story short, she has shown signs of memory problems and other symptoms for the past four years and has been referred once already to the memory clinic, last Feb...but the referral was lost . It took three months for that to come to light, by which time my parents were just starting a house move north to be close to me, so it was decided to wait. Now that move has been completed and the appointment has been made. However in the interim months, Mum has deteriorated more rapidly and amongst other things, has lost most of her ability to communicate - now she hardly speaks, she can't seem to find the words for what she wants to say, and what she does say is very hard to understand. So I think it's unlikely that any of the standard memory assessments will be much use, and was wondering what they might do instead. Or whether the new GP will just not attempt a new assessment and simply use what is in her record from Feb to do a fresh referral? Does anyone have any experience of this situation?