Another anguished email this month from a family carer desperately asking for a means of getting appropriate dementia care for her mother, who was in a non-member hospital. The daughter was exasperated that the staff simply kept saying the same things, but with increasing volume, as if her mother was deaf and would eventually respond as they hoped; they had no concept at all of how inappropriate their approach was.
Carers absolutely have the right to expect hospital staff to be equipped to deliver appropriate dementia care. This isn’t new; strong, functional approaches have been available and in use now for well over a decade. The National Dementia Strategy clearly states some fundamentals of appropriate care and carers may cite these when querying any lack of it. Every hospital should have a Dementia Lead and that Lead should be able to explain what the hospital is doing to enable the staff team to care well for people living with dementia. Where there is a lack of appropriate care, they should be listening to concerns and coming up with answers about how they’ll address these.
Carers, you should never be reluctant to make your concerns known; it’s perfectly possible to do this calmly and politely – and the people you care for need you to push for appropriate care for them. We can’t simply wait and hope; if some hospitals – huge, medium, small; city, town, rural – have been delivering excellent dementia care for many years, others ought to be able to do the same; if they really are lagging behind, they should by now have firm plans in place to address this. MPs should be aware of what their local hospitals deliver to people living with dementia; platitudes won’t cut it. It’s not about affording it; it’s cheaper to get dementia care right than to get it wrong, because getting it wrong greatly extends length of stay, which also leads to an increase in the likelihood of people not returning to their own home .
Staff – if you want to understand more, make it clear to your line manager that you’re requesting education!
This isn’t about the Butterfly Scheme – indeed, I couldn’t possibly find time to educate every non-member hospital, even if they approached me! This is about raising expectations, because we’re well past the era when “dementia awareness” was considered enough; appropriate hospital dementia care is the right of everyone who needs it.