Dementia affects the entire family

Someone with dementia is not the person you used to know. Always, this happens too quickly. This asks for high adaptability of the family in a short amount of time. As partner, child and/or grandchild you are faced with difficult decisions to be made. In some cultures it is common that elderly are taken in other people’s homes. However, this is not always a viable option. What is the best choice?

How to live with dementia

Of course, you want your parents to be able to live independently at home (mostly they want this too), but in reality this leads to a lot of driving back and forth for the littlest things. For example; the washing machine does not turn on, the television does not work, forgot to take medication and so on. The hard part is the little availability of time. Combining your own household and job with the care giving of your parents is nearly impossible in a week consisting out of only 7 days. Common elderly will get more insecure about certain thing as they age (driving, opening the door for strangers), however, this process is accelerated in people with dementia. For someone with dementia it is uncertain what their life contains and means. This person is insecure and in a constant battle to fight for his/her own identity. Eliminating the insecurity is therefore of tremendous importance.

Half measures

Offering support in daily activities can cause a great release of insecurity and pressure, because it provides the needed and wanted structure in life. Often we hear that caregivers make use of ‘post-it’-notes, which they stick somewhere in the house of the patient, marked with for example ‘Take medication at 12.00 a.m.’, ‘Home care will arrive in the afternoon’, ‘take clothes out of the washing machine’. This is a flawed system, giving that post-its fall off and often go unnoticed. Leading to driving back and forth again because home care cannot come in or the patients forgot to take his medication again. Elderly are discouraged by the modern-day technology and take advantage in simple, user-friendly things, like post its. However, this is not a convenient way to bring back structure into the life of a person with dementia, due to reasons named above.

The dementia clock

Next to this, a post-it cannot function as a memory aid concerning realisation of time and day. So what if I told you there some sort of modern day technology exist that will bring back structure to the lives of every elderly person? There is! This form of modern day technology is the DayClock dementia clock. A day calendar with time, part of the day and data display, which only has to be read. Visit our website to see an overview of all our models. Questions? Do not be afraid to contact us or take a look at our dementia clock in our webshop.