Nursing Home Care of Alzheimer’s Disease
There is no perfectly “right” time for placing the person with Alzheimer’s disease in an adult care facility. The timing depends upon the needs of the individual and the ability of the caregiver to meet those needs. It is a good idea to begin considering a choice for placement well in advance of the need. This will give you adequate time to research your decision.
Objective: People with Alzheimer’s disease are often placed in a nursing home, sometimes after using adult day care services. How affected persons function during this potentially difficult transition is not well understood. The aim of this study was to examine the associations of day care use and nursing home placement with the rate of cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease.
How do I know which nursing home to choose?
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the government agency that administers these medical-assistance programs, has developed a database of information on every Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home in the country, including more than 17,000 nationwide.
Choosing Full or Part Time Care
Do you want the nursing home or care facility to be full-time, respite care or day care? It may make a difference in terms of costs and availability.
Dementia severity and carehome mortality rates
Research varies as to whether the severity of dementia experienced by people affects survival rates in nursing homes and care facilities.
Gambassia found the effect of severity of dementia on survival of patients with Alzheimer’s disease is inconsistent. His research looking at people living in United States nursing homes found that severity of dementia had no influence on survival.
The main difference between nursing and residential homes is that residential homes look after people who are more active and alert. Nursing homes generally have a greater number of registered nurses on their staff in order to provide 24-hour nursing care.
Study participants who had previous adult day care experience fared better.  As level of day care use at study onset increased, the association of nursing home placement with accelerated cognitive decline substantially decreased. Thus, people using day care 3 to 4 days a week at the beginning of the study showed no increase in cognitive decline upon nursing home placement.
According to a 1998 study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the annual cost of caring for patients with Alzheimer’s disease in Canada increases with the severity of the disease7. Patients in the early to mild stages of AD cost $9,451 to treat and care for on a yearly basis. In contrast, the cost to treat patients who have progressed to the severe stage increases four-fold to reach $36,794 with institutionalisation costs representing 84 per cent of the total of cost of care.
Because so many people with Alzheimer’s die in nursing homes, make sure a copy of your loved one’s advance directives are in his or her medical charts, so the staff will know what is and isn’t to be done in medical emergencies.
