healthmedicinet

“For everyone, but particularly with dementia, it is particularly
important to focus on things that are familiar and enable people create a
link back to their life before entering a care home.

“A willingness to take bit of furniture, bedspreads, curtains, whatever
it might be that creates that link can be incredibly important in civilising
care homes and making them a real home for someone, rather than an austere
alien environment.

“Having your own possessions can be critical in reassuring someone with
dementia and in making them feel at home. Flexibility has to be the key –
and whatever works for that individual that’s what the care home ought to
focusing on.

“We are introducing these much more robust inspections and ratings of
care homes and I think those care homes that create a real sense of an
individual’s home will be the ones who get the great ratings.”

From October, 25,000 homes and home-care providers will be subject to a new
inspection regime which will rate them. The worst homes can be put on
special measures, giving them a limited time to improve or close.

The Care Quality Commission, the watchdog, admitted earlier this month that it
has in the past failed the elderly and vulnerable because it feared legal
threats from the owners of privately-run care homes.

Lesley Carter, the policy programme manager for social care at Age UK and
former nursing manager, said: “Putting things that are familiar around a
person’s room, not necessarily photographs but things they can touch, that
they can look at, something like a bedspread that they have always had.

“They might not recognise it as their own but it would feel familiar as
they touched it and it would evoke memories.

“Rooms should be made to suit the person in it, coloured the way the person
likes but you will never know what they like if you don’t know them. Care
homes often have no idea what makes that person tick.

“Quite a lot homes have done a lot of work and have the things you want,
but we go to the homes maybe run by independent people they have very small
rooms, very low ceilings people in a regime rather than about the patient
experience.”

It came after a government-backed report from the Dementia Centre at Stirling
University made a series of suggestions about how to improve care homes.

They include allowing people to paint their bedroom doors whatever colour they
want, surrounding themselves with personal photographs and ensuring rooms
have plenty of natural light.

Alison Dawson, one of the research fellows who produced the report, said that
people with dementia can become confused and forget where they are and “live
in a different moment”.

She said: “The more you are able to reassure people by having things that are
familiar to them, the more comfortable they are likely to feel.

“The care home environments are quite sterile, its improving, and there
is a greater knowledge about how to make things more homely and friendlier
environments but there is still lots to do.

“Sometimes people with dementia live in a different moment, they may
occasionally feel they are in a different time-frame, so to have photographs
and other memorabilia around that reminds them of the times and places where
they were happy and comfortable and they are likely to go back to outside of
the current moment tends to have a calming influence.”