My Debut Blog Post: An Inspiring Model of Dementia Care at Lakeview Ranch
Thursday, October 25, 2012 at 12:01PM Today I'd like to share with you a video about the kind of place I wish my mother, Judy, could have lived in these past 7 years that I've been her caregiver. My mother is 80, living in a nursing home with advanced dementia (vascular and probable Alzheimer's disease). Since she first moved into my home with me, my husband and 2 children in 2005, she's also lived in a conventional assisted living facility that had no real support for people with dementia, then a rehab center when she fractured her pelvis, where she was pretty much left on her own between her physical therapy sessions. She then lived in a private-pay "memory care" facility where she enjoyed 2 1/2 years of specialized dementia care and lovely, attentive staff, until she ran out of money and needed more care than they could provide.
This video is about a home in Minnesota for people with dementia called Lakeview Ranch, started by Judy Berry, left, a woman whose mother had dementia years ago and was bounced from facility to facility because of her "aggressive" behavior. Judy invested her savings into a home where people with middle- and end-stage dementia could continue to enjoy life each day despite the ravages of the disease, a place where the staff would know how to communicate with the residents and treat them as fully human, not "shells" of their former selves. Now she has two homes with 85 staff trained to provide person-centered dementia care.
But how do people afford this kind of care? Judy did not want to limit her vision of dementia care only to people with lots of savings, so she started the Dementia Care Foundation, a MN non-profit 501c3 to provide scholarship funding.
My mother lived in a memory care facility similar to the Lakeview Ranch model, but it was not nearly as lively or full of joy. The staff at the Lakeview Ranch seem much happier, too. Lakeview Ranch takes dementia care to a whole new level.
The video gets off to a slow start for the first minute or so, with a rather ominous-sounding narrator, but hang in there, because it's truly inspiring. Here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQGaEceKXng&list=UU_4MvaAKoD-FSnSV0BxRa3Q&index=3&feature=plcp
Please post your comments or questions below. Thank you!
Martha Stettinius
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