Care at Home for People Living with Dementia—Delaying Institutionalization, Sustaining Families Christine Ceci and Mary Ellen Purkis

Abstract

The boundary between the care provided to a person living with Dementia within their family home and that provided from outside the family home—through professionals, care providers, day care and so on—is clearly illustrated and evidenced via the interviews and observations made by the authors with those families involved in the research they conducted. What stands out is the stark realisation that the help provided by professionals or from a service setting is sometimes unhelpful for the families. For the families and the people they care for it can be a purely transactional experience and an expectation of fitting into the service’s structures and processes within the frame of being helpful. The book advocates, from a strong evidence base, that those interactions that occur when a family or person reaches out for support could become much more meaningful and helpful if they were based on a relational interaction; listening to the persons circumstances and finding a solution that would work best for their circumstances rather than offering a list of pre-approved services. There is a section of the book which describes how the interaction that was most helpful for families was found in the most simple of questions, for instance ‘how can I be of most use to you today?’