I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this and can help. My FIL moved into a care home about a week ago. The care home has a residential floor and an EMI/dementia floor. When they completed his evaluation, they decided to move him into the residential floor, where he's been living for the past week. He has not settled particularly well, but not particularly poorly either from what I've heard of other people's stories. He has been walking the halls a lot--he was used to going for walks regularly when he was at home, which I think may be part of why he's doing this. We've been to visit him every day, and he sometimes seems quite upset, but not aggressive. The staff said he seemed very focused on the door and spending time around the door, which is why they want to move him upstairs. I don't know if they really mean he's made an escape attempt, but he's always in his room or the lounge when we come to visit. When we visited the dementia floor initially, people seemed much worse off than he is right now. We were hoping that he would be able to get a bit more human interaction by moving into the care home, and it seems unlikely that's going to happen on the EMI floor.
On the one hand, we want to respect the care home staff's opinions, as obviously they have a lot of experience. On the other hand, we're concerned that this is really too short a time span in which to make this kind of decision, especially given that most of the time he has been there has been during the holidays when the regular managers haven't been in attendance. Has anyone been in a similar scenario? How do you best advocate for a relative in this situation?
On the one hand, we want to respect the care home staff's opinions, as obviously they have a lot of experience. On the other hand, we're concerned that this is really too short a time span in which to make this kind of decision, especially given that most of the time he has been there has been during the holidays when the regular managers haven't been in attendance. Has anyone been in a similar scenario? How do you best advocate for a relative in this situation?