Tales from Aged Care

 One of the things I do at work, is take families of prospective residents on tours of the care home. I enjoy meeting people and often become invested in their stories. Family members are often quite raw and distressed, sometimes they are a bit absent and sometimes they think a hard luck story will bump them up the list. It was impressed on me that my assessment of prospective families is crucial to our ability to maintain calm and safety in the home but I haven't ever found it necessary to test how much power I really have.

The memory support unit is one of the first places we pass on a tour and I always mention it, not because it's important to point out but because it gives me something to say in the early part of a tour.

This week a woman came to tour, with a view to placing her husband in care. The lady was immaculate with a professional blow dry, professional nails, tasteful gold jewellery, navy blazer and dark fitted pants. As we passed the memory support unit I pointed it out.

"My husband will be in there, we need to see it" 

I explained that other parts of the building look the same and I have been told not to go into the unit.

The lady stopped walking and told me again that she needed to see it.

I resisted again, telling her it would be wrong to go wandering and upsetting the residents. Then the son backed her up. I made one last protest but I did feel cornered.

On their fourth try, I gave in and said we could just go in and have a quick look near the door, there would be no wandering through.

Of course when we got there, the lady wanted to look at the courtyard, asked about an open door on the other side of the yard and suggested residents might abscond through there (they can't, that's the whole point of a locked unit) and generally ignored every boundary I tried to set. 

After a very uncomfortable few minutes I started herding them toward the exit. Only I don't go in the memory support area and couldn't recognise the unmarked exit. I was going to go and find another staff member to ask but the lady was on her own mission to find the exit and I didn't want to walk away from the rogue visitor.

Some time in all of this I became clearer about what I needed to say and told the lady that the residents with dementia are very vulnerable and shouldn't be upset by strangers wandering through the only safe space available to them.

It was a moment of clarity I wished had come earlier but at least it had come. The lady became a bit easier to handle after that and I managed to find an exit. We had to walk through the nurses station and I felt bad about it but I was just glad to be out of there.

I completed the tour: answered questions, explained finance and showed them an empty room but by the time I returned to my office I knew that I would make my first ever suggestion that this was a family who might be better accommodated somewhere else.