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Memory care Kitchener-Waterloo

Find the best Alzheimer's care in Waterloo-Wellington

Memory care and Alzheimer's care in Kitchener-Waterloo is exceptional, including several cutting edge seniors' care facilities. Waterloo is also home to the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging, which works with a number of local care facilities to offer the very best, latest research. If your loved one has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease – or any related dementia – learn all you can about these memory care retirement homes.

Where to start with an Alzheimer's diagnosis

When your loved one has received an Alzheimer's diagnosis, this is heartbreaking, upsetting, and life-changing. Once you get past the shock, it's healthy to take action. Getting proactive with an Alzheimer's diagnosis puts you back in charge. There are many resources available to help you so you can begin to map out your caregiver journey. 

You will contact Home and Community Care Support Services in Waterloo Wellington as soon as possible, after you have received the diagnosis. They and other healthcare professionals will list all publicly available resources that can help you; many of these sources have wait times, waiting lists, or otherwise limited availability.

An alternative for many people is to augment care with private care services. 

More help for Alzheimer's care from ComfortLife.ca

Home care services in the region can be a great help to you. The Waterloo Region LHIN may recommend these and you may qualify for financial support; here, too, there may be limitations to availability. As an alternative, you can consider hiring private home care services, of which there are many in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.

Respite care services allow you to take a breather from giving care (or even a vacation). This is also supported by the LHIN but with some limitations on availability. You may want to consider the advantage of a temporary stay in a retirement home, a service offered by many local retirement residences. Giving yourself a break from caregiving will make you a much better caregiver in the long run. This will help to alleviate stress and the potential for caregiver burnout. Should you qualify, you can avail yourself of up to 90 days per year of respite care help. This includes a stay in a local long term care home, and/or respite care available from local home care services. 

Read reviews of Kitchener-Waterloo retirement homes before you commit to senior care anywhere in the Tri-cities. 

Caregiver benefits are available to you in a wide variety, including tax credits you can claim, as well as federal government benefits available to you. Many of these caregiver tax benefits may surprise you.

In later stages of the disease, you may see Sundown Syndrome or similar issues arise. At this point, you will look at getting an assessment from a healthcare professional, who may quickly assign long term care. Be sure to check out the home, though. Not all long term care homes are the same and your loved one may be assigned a bed in a care home that may be less than desirable.

There are many families who turn down the bed assigned to them by the LHIN and choose to wait for a bed in a more-preferred care home. If this is you, you will be put on a waiting list for that home and your wait may be longer. In this situation, you may want to temporarily move your loved one into one of the memory care facilities listed above. These homes have a number of specialized features for Alzheimer's care. Features you may find in local homes can include any or all of the following:

• Design for dementia sufferers. This includes hallways with colour coding, explicit signage and more
• Specialized care training, including training in gentle persuasion
• Medication administration and in-depth healthcare 

For families with the foresight and emotional fortitude to look at the whole picture, you might ask if care homes also offer palliative care. A terminal diagnosis is a fact of life in the case of Alzheimer's Disease, and there is an advantage in getting into a home that also offers this option, so that family and ailing loved one are acclimatized to one place that accounts for all late stages of the disease. 

We wish you all the best in your search. 

Other external resources

healthcareathome.ca/ww/en

ontario.ca/../respite-care