From the Front Page Sections, on the lacking of the long-term care providing systems, translated…
Lacking in the Hardware Resources! The Hospitals or the Nursing Homes Lacking the Hardware, and there’s, only a Limited Number of Daycare Centers, it’s, Truly Awful! Even if You Have the Money to Pay, the Demented Elderly Still Can’t be Admitted, the Loved Ones, Down on Their Knees, Begged for the Time to Breathe.
If you believe, that not having the money is what caused the sorrows, the tragedies in long-term care, there are, so many families with demented elderly in the family who HAVE the money, and still can’t get their problems resolved. The former head of the Department of Sanitation, Yeh pointed out, that his friend’s father suffered from the complications of psychotic symptoms that came hand-in-hand with his diagnoses of dementia, and he’d taken his father all over, but, no place was, willing to, take his father in. The Asia-East Head of Neurology, Dr. Jen stated, that this was NOT an isolated case in Taiwan, “This is what’s currently happening every single day at the hospital setting”.
Yeh had asked around on his friend’s behalf, and found, that the Long-Term Care 2.9 that’s initiated by the current government, had set up the supportive communities, but, the demented elderly who showed signs of psychosis, are the forgotten. Because there’s no way of curing these patients, the ordinary hospital wards refused to take them in, and, there wasn’t any psychiatrists stationed in the nursing homes, or the sanitorium, these residential homes aren’t well-equipped to deal with the situations that may happen with these patients with the psychosis, and, they’d, NOT dared accepting them.
The C.E.O. of the Taiwanese Association of Dementia & Alzheimer’s, Lai said, that a lot of the demented elderly would experience psychological symptoms such as being emotionally unstable, becoming violent, having hallucinations, and delusions, which troubled the families and the nursing staff more so than the deterioration of their cognitive abilities. The head of the General Neurology Department of Asian-East Hospital, Dr. Jen said, over eighty-percent of the demented elderly patients are cared for at home, and, thirty-to-forty percent of these home cared patients exerted symptoms of psychosis.
The Changgang Hospital’s Head of the Alzheimer’s Research Center, Hsu pointed out, the residences of the patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s with psychosis needed to be cared for by specialized groups of medical staff, but currently, whether it was the hospitals, the homes, there wasn’t the set up for caring for the patients with psychosis yet. Take for instance the hospital, to take in the patients like this, the hospitals would need to set up an isolated protective quarter, to prevent the behaviors of attacks on the nursing staff, and, there would be needs for social worker, and case managers too, he’d called out to those medical centers with the assets, to take the first step in setting up the systems.
The professional on Alzheimer’s said, that the psychosis that came with Alzheimer’s normally shows up in the earlier, to middle stages of dementia, and, if the elderly get taken to the daycare units without assessments first, they may become depressed, and/or delusional. The best way is to have the families, accompanying the elderly with dementia, combined with the daycare centers, so the families can have breathing time. But Jeng told, that there’s, only limited spots in the daycare units, “as the families cried to me of how fatigued they became, taking care of their demented elderly loved ones, and begged for time off, there was, nothing I can do for them, and, it’d, felt awful.”
And, this is happening, because of the lacking in resources, the lacking in planning out more and building of more daycare centers, to give the caretakers time to breathe, and, there’s, nothing to be done, because, taking care of Alzheimer’s patients is still on a trial-by-error basis.