Language issues

[Kikki21]

For some time now, I do fear that my mum is loosing the ability to speak English. I’m going to raise it up with her care home as English is not her first language. A lot of the time, she is refusing to speak it anyway & the other part of the time is that I think she can’t remember how to speak it.
She has actually lived in England more than she has in Poland.

She speaks her home language Polish to me about 80% of the time when I visit it with my fiancé. She speaks Polish to him & of course he doesn’t understand.

She also speaks Polish to the other residents & claims that they understand her but none of them do. I feel that this is another sign of decline & I wonder what the care home will do if she loses the ability to speak English?

 

[Szaitisja]

Are there by any chance any polish carers in the home? I found when I was working in one few years ago we had so many different nationalities employed and now looking after my friend at home, we have cares coming in to help and there are quite a few polish ones and few other nationalities also.

Edited since I just caught up at your thread and you posted that no one speaks polish in the CH

 

[canary]

I can see that the residents would probably not speak Polish, but I am surprised that none of the carers do. At Mum s care home there was a carer there who was from Lithuania and as well as speaking English she could also speak German, Polish and Russian. She was multi-lingual!

Could you perhaps employ someone to go in and talk to her in Polish?

The carers should be used to caring for people who have entirely lost all language, so they should be able to work things out. I wondered whether it could help if you made a laminated card of pictures of things she might want - cup of tea, toilet, etc, so that she could point to the picture to let the carers know. Talk to the care home about this, they may already have a system that they use for people with no speech.

 

[Kikki21]

Most of the carers at the home are either English or from East Asia. I was actually surprised myself that there was not anyone Polish in there seeing as we are in one of the largest Polish community centres outside of London. Certainly one agency used a lot of Polish carers & maybe they do that instead of working in a care home.

It is true that there are people in there who don’t talk or struggle to speak but clearly my mum can talk just not in English!

 

[Jessbow]

Doesnt really matter what her mother tongue is, if she speaks a language that the carers do not understand, she needs another form of communication ( or they do- hence suggestion of clue cards) . Many PWD have a language that carers dont understand,
With my tongue in cheek, I can say my late mother spoke gibberish inter-dispersed with gobbledegook. Carers got by.

 

[Izzy]

I wondered if there would be a volunteer from a local Polish society who might be prepared to pop in and talk with your mum, if you felt that would help at all.

I see your location is East Midlands so I had a google and found this link -

http://www.empp.co.uk/indexe.php