Assisted Living Placements Blog

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Written by: patrick on November 30, 2010 @ 5:03 pm

Happy Holidays from Assisted Living Placements!  This is my favorite time of year, but unfortunately, it is also a very busy time of year for us here at Assisted Living Placements.  It seems that accidents and mental down-turns happen more frequently during the holidays.  We also hear from adult children who might be seeing their parent for the first time a while and are now forced to confront a dangerous situation.  Whatever the reason, these holiday placements are particularly hard on everyone involved.  On the other hand, as an advocate for seniors and for assisted living, sometimes the move to assisted living and away from danger and isolation, is the best thing that can happen given the circumstances.

With that, I would like to take time to relay a situation I recently observed which really drives home the need for adult children to evaluate their motives when looking at assisted living.  We have discussed, previously, how adult children will often evaluate assisted living, not so much by how it will meet the parents needs, but rather by how they would like it.  This often happens unconsciously.  It happens often, and is usually a recipe for mistakes and hard feelings.  Just this week I have been dealing with such a family.

We received a call from a family that has to find a place for mom who is suffering from dementia.  The dementia is light to moderate but definitely dementia.  They quoted us a budget amount they were comfortable with and after discussing alternatives that met needs and budget constraints, we decided to look at Board & Care homes.  As we all remember, B&C homes are all licensed for dementia patients and are usually “one fee covers all”.   Our tour (Thanksgiving weekend – yes we are amazing) went very well and the family seemed very pleased.

Today we were contacted by the family and asked for a list of large apartment style assisted living communities.  Of course, this type of facility, the type the family is interested in, are prohibited by state law from accepting residents with a diagnosis of dementia.  This family was interested in pursuing the often used strategy of having a doctor change the diagnoses to ‘mild cognitive impairment’ so as to by-pass this law.  It seems that they had gone to one large community after our tour and felt that it was “head and shoulders” above the places they had just so recently told us were excellent.

Our problem here is three-fold.  First, if they do choose one of these assisted living communities they will be looking at another move, sooner rather than later, more than likely.  As soon as that dementia expresses itself in public, the assisted living community will begin to push to have her move.  They will not risk their license.  Second, the family, in looking at the large facilities increased the budget they were “comfortable” with by a full thousand dollars a month.  If we had been given this tolerance while looking at Board & Care homes we would have seen a different caliber of homes.  Finally, they are evaluating these assisted living choices for what they would like rather than mom.  It is a statistical fact that dementia patients do better in a small assisted living environment, rather than a large.

This is simply a classic case of good intentions leading a family down the wrong path.  Of course if they do choose a large community and then have to move, we will be their for them, but even one move is so hard on a senior.  I hope they will re-evaluate their motivation for a large assisted living community.  Board & Care assisted living is the proper choice in this case.

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Catogories: Assisted Living Information, Senior Citizen Needs, assisted living education

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