Identifying When In-Home Care is Needed for People with Dementia

Dementia is a broad term for a symptom that covers a suite of symptoms. Because of this, determining when a person with dementia needs in-home care services is different from one individual to the next. From frontotemporal to vascular dementia, care needs will differ, but there are some aspects that you shouldn’t overlook if you start to see them in your loved ones, especially when they are having memory issues:

They Forget to Eat

As people age, proper nutrition only becomes more important. However, many older adults may also lose some of their appetite. When you combine this with memory issues, it can result in someone skipping multiple meals due to not getting hungry the way they used to.
Without a fully functional short-term memory, hunger is the main indicator for these older adults of whether or not they need to eat. Even if they’ve been told they need to eat when they aren’t particularly hungry, there’s no guarantee they’ll remember to do so. An in-home care professional can help make sure they stay on track, or even prepare the meal for them.

They Forget to Take Important Meds

This is even easier to happen than forgetting to eat for someone with memory issues. Hunger is something that can only be attributed to one thing, not eating. But if someone doesn’t take their meds, it may just make them feel generally bad at first. This is much harder to attribute to one thing, let alone forgetting meds. Depending on how new the medication is, someone with memory issues may not even remember everything they’re taking. Sometimes an automated pill dispenser will be enough, but even those aren’t guaranteed to work. It’s not uncommon for someone to just grab the pills and leave them on the counter. With a 24/7 care professional, your loved one will get their meds exactly when they need them.

They Are Having Incontinence Issues

While this isn’t unique to dementia, it’s still an important consideration for whether or not someone needs in-home care. Incontinence isn’t just unpleasant and upsetting for the person experiencing it, it poses a health risk. Fecal matter can cause severe skin irritation and infections of all kinds. Depending on the severity of someone’s memory issues, they could neglect to clean themselves up, or surface that need to be sanitized.

This is when 24-hour and overnight care may be particularly helpful. Even if someone doesn’t need help going to the bathroom, having a professional to keep them on a schedule for bathroom breaks could help prevent incontinence incidents. It also provides much needed support when they do.

An At-Home Care Agency You Can Trust

When a loved one has dementia, it can be hard to know what to do to help them. It can be even harder to choose what type of hourly care, or any other kind of care, is best for them. If they have memory issues, they may not even be able to remember their caregiver. If you’re hesitant about getting someone to stay with your loved one, we understand.

Contact us today and ask about our 24-7 care options. We can show you what our 20+ years of expertise and our DementiaWise® bring to the table. Our team is full of professionals with a passion for care.