Families of Alzheimer’s Patients Need to Research Nursing Homes Before a Crisis

Dr. Dana Winegarner, D.O,  MidAmerica Neuroscience Institute

One of the major difficulties for families who have a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease revolves around planning for the future.

Unfortunately, most Alzheimer’s patients at some point will need more care than their families can give them at home. This is not because family members don’t care enough or are not willing to try to keep the Alzheimer’s patient at home. There is just no system for providing the type of support at home that is necessary. Most families cannot afford private, in-house, around-the-clock nursing, nor do they have enough stay-at-home family members to provide coverage.

This leaves a nursing home as the final option for advancing Alzheimer’s disease. Many adult children feel tremendous guilt about even considering putting a parent in a nursing home. They may look nostalgically back to the past when families cared for elderly parents for many years. Remember, though, families were bigger then, lived in larger households, and often worked close to home or on the farm. In addition, people did not live as long as they do today so we did not see as many cases of advanced Alzheimer’s.

Medical experts also know that even those people who took pride in caring for their elderly parents in their homes often did so at a tremendous personal and financial sacrifice, and may even be bitter about it today.

Start looking for a nursing home long before it’s needed
The system of health care that is currently in place for people with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s in the United States is the nursing home. In many cases, nursing home placement can be a good option, allowing a patient to receive consistent 24-hour-a-day care. Often the nursing home offers the optimum dignity for the patient, the optimum care, and maximizes preservation of the caregiver. In addition, once the Alzheimer’s patient has 24-hour-aday care, the family can still visit daily, or even take the loved one home or for short trips.

For this reason, we don’t advise ever promising someone with Alzheimer’s they will never have to go to a nursing home. We just cannot control the future enough to make this kind of pledge.

The secret to finding an appropriate nursing home, however, is to start a long time – even years – in advance. That’s because there are several steps to researching and choosing the best nursing care facility. The steps include:

1. Obtain a list of which nursing homes will take patients
   with Alzheimer’s. Make sure to ask if they will take, or
   keep, patients who move beyond mild into more severe
   cases. Also ask if the nursing home will accept the type of
   insurance that will be used to pay for it.
2. Explore each qualifying nursing home personally.Meet with the financial officers to explore the cost.
3.  Look around to see if the nursing home is clean and
   inviting, and observe whether the patients seem happy and well-cared for.
4. 4. When you find an acceptable facility, get on the waiting list. You may not feel it is time for your loved one to go into the nursing home yet, but waiting lists can be up to
   two years long.