"Our mother's care"

This time last year me and my sister were really struggling to know how to best support our mother who has Alzheimer's disease. Mum lives alone and has coped with the disease for about 7 years now, but last summer things started to unravel and she was causing great concern to us and to her local community. She was wandering, often confused and distressed, even behaving aggressively at times in her local community.

Apart from the dementia her health is good, but she was showing real signs of self neglect and struggling to eat even the tiniest of meals. Up until this point, like so many of her generation, mum was fiercely independent and had therefore resisted any suggestion of home care. She has also got a lifelong distrust of taking medicine of any sort.

My sister and I were constantly on the phone to anyone we thought could advise us what to do to support mum- but were growing more and more frustrated. We felt really stuck because we knew that the two most obvious suggestions- introducing medication and home care, would be resisted! In the meantime we were, between us, providing virtually 24 hour support in order to keep mum safe, stop her night time excursions around the streets and prevent her from becoming distressed, confused and angry.

Our community mental health nurse suggested a referral to the Derby Dementia Rapid Response Team. No sooner had he made the call than they were on the phone, and a fantastic, highly skilled professional from the team had come to see us and mum the same day! Incredible! Over the next six weeks the team supported mum and us by completing a really detailed assessment of all her needs, supporting her to begin taking an Alzheimers medication, befriending her and getting her accustomed to accepting help. She was at times getting 4 visits a day from this team, They were all brilliant with her. We began to notice a real improvement in her well being after a couple of weeks and we gradually transitioned the support from the DRRT to a commercial carer's company. DRRT professionals liaised closely with the new carers during this period to ensure thet she was continuing to accept the support she needed.

Nearly one year on mum continues to be well, healthy and happy in her own home, despite her worsening dementia. She has paid carers three times a day who she looks forward to seeing and talks warmly about, she is taking medicine which is helping to reduce some of the extreme confusion that she experienced before, she is able to function in her own home and within her community. It's a transformation that would not have been possible without that intensive support. We are really grateful that a service exists where people who know what they are doing actually come and get stuck in instead of offering long distance advice. Me and my sister still see her three times a week but we are able to focus on the things she loves such as gardening.