December 15, 1999

Tendercare opening Alzheimer's wing

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       To meet the growing number of Alzheimer's patients coming to their facility, Tendercare will open a new 33-bed wing dedicated to Alzheimer's patients on January 5 of next year. To prepare its staff to meet the special needs of these patients, Tendercare sponsored a four-week in-service for 23 staff members that ended late last month.
      "We wanted the staff to know how to deal with some of the behaviors of Alzheimer's disease," said Dale Chilcote, administrator for Tendercare. "This is not so much meeting their medical needs but their social needs, as these are wandering, confused patients that we need to keep busy."
      Staff learned that most Alzheimer's patients do not have medical complications until the latter stages of the disease; instead they are forgetful, confused and can display inappropriate behaviors because of the dementia. This means that skilled medical nursing care takes a back seat to meeting their basic physical and social needs.
      "I've certainly worked with dementia patients but was not an expert in any way," said Linda Austin, RN, care coordinator for the new unit. "We just all learned more about it and talked about what to expect and do for these patients. We hope that a separate unit can accommodate their needs more."
      The new unit will function differently from the rest of the facility to allow these patients the most freedom possible within the scope of their illness. Some differences include having the staff eat with patients in a family-style atmosphere and participate in activities with them. Meal and snack times will also be more flexible to account for individual's different schedules, mimicking more closely the home life they left behind.
      Having a closed wing just for Alzheimer's patients also means the middle-of-the-night wanderings, so common in this dementia that destroys a person's sense of time, will not disturb other patients. Instead, staff can give them a snack or do an activity with them before encouraging them to go back to bed.
      "Having the staff do things with the patients like this is an attempt to bring them back to the sociality they are used to," said Hope Figgis, mental health consultant with the Catholic Human Services, who created and conducted the in-service. "Families are all in favor of these ideas and the separate wing. It's very exciting."