This category contains blog posts on how to best design a dementia care system.
Dementia villages are springing up in Europe, Britain, and Canada. These are Truman Show-style communities, where the residents are people who have dementia and everyone who works there—the shopkeepers and waitresses, policemen and postmen—are actually caregivers. The idea is to provide people with familiar surroundings and the usual activities of daily life so that they … Read more
One of the most difficult problems of aging is staying in contact with those we love. We are social creatures. We need to be around other people. But how much social contact we need—and what kind is best—differs from one person to the next. Introvert or extrovert? Some of us are more extroverted, while others are … Read more
We cannot always choose to age in place and be cared for in our own homes. Sometimes we need round-the-clock nursing care that is too expensive for our families, or there are not enough resources available near a rural home. Sometimes a long-term care insurance policy, or the state’s Medicaid system, will not cover the … Read more
We hear a lot about the cost to Medicare of seniors returning to the hospital within days of being released. Here in Moscow, we have a transitional care team—staff from the hospital’s discharge department and representatives from the local care facilities and senior care agencies—which meets to talk about how we can work together to … Read more
The approach we currently use to care for people with dementia in the United States has a name. It’s called appropriate care. It hasn’t been very successful, though, for when we think of dementia care in America we think of people who are both difficult to take care of and unhappy, and their families and … Read more