Conditions and daily care
Caring for a parent with dementia at home: 30 days
A calm, week-by-week plan for the first 30 days after a dementia diagnosis: routines, safety, medicines, family roles and where to find help.
A dementia diagnosis does not erase the person your parent has always been, but it does change the shape of your days. The first month is not the time to build a perfect system. It is the time to keep everyone safe, keep the house calm, and settle into one routine that every member of the family follows the same way. Consistency in these four weeks will do more than any gadget you can buy.
Days 1 to 7: change nothing yet
The instinct in week one is to rearrange everything: move the bed downstairs, clear out the kitchen, put new locks on the doors. Resist it. The familiar layout is doing quiet work for your parent right now. It is how they find the bathroom without having to think. Keep the waking time, the bath time and the meal times roughly where they were before.
What you should change in week one is information, not furniture. Put one phone number sheet on the fridge: the treating doctor, a family member who is always reachable, and the nearest person who can come at night. Keep every prescription and discharge paper in a single folder. If your parent has been prescribed medicines for memory or behaviour, collect them from one pharmacy, store them in one place, and never adjust a dose yourself. Changing what has been prescribed is the treating doctor’s decision alone.
Week two: find the good hours
Most people with dementia have parts of the day when they are settled and parts when they are not. Watch for a fortnight and you will see the pattern: a calm window, often in the morning, and a restless window, often late afternoon or evening. Put the hard tasks inside the calm window.
Bathing belongs there. In many Indian homes the bathroom has a raised threshold, a bucket and a mug, and nothing to hold on to. For someone who is unsteady that is the riskiest room in the house. Have the caregiver fill the bucket beforehand, keep the water at one steady temperature, stay close throughout, and put down a non-slip mat. Change clothes out in the room where the floor is dry. Keep the restless window undemanding: a familiar song, a slow walk in the courtyard, sitting with whoever is cooking.
Week three: the safety pass
Walk the house slowly with a notebook, room by room, and write what you see rather than what you intend to fix. The home safety checklist covers the same ground.
- Loose rugs, mats and threshold strips lifted or taped down
- The path from bed to bathroom lit at night
- Gas lighter and cylinder valve kept out of easy reach
- Water vessels and hot pans never left on the floor
- Duplicate keys, cards, jewellery and cash secured in one place
- Main door marked clearly, so it is findable but not unnoticed when opened
- Medicines in one box, in one place, out of reach
Two items deserve a sentence each. Money and documents: confusion about payments often arrives with the diagnosis, and this is the point at which families quietly take over the ATM card. Do it openly, explain it once, and keep the account in your parent’s name. And the kitchen: unplug the mixer when it is not in use, keep the cylinder valve closed, and consider moving cooking to one side of the house so the smell and the routine stay familiar while the risk drops.
Week four: decide who does what
By now you know roughly how much help each day needs. Write the day out in hours: waking, bath, meals, walk, medicines, night. Then write names against the hours. In a joint family this is usually the hardest conversation of the month, because everyone agrees that something must be done and nobody agrees whose turn it is.
Put the rota on paper and start it while nobody is tired. If the gaps are larger than the family can fill, that is the moment to look at dementia care properly: a trained caregiver at fixed hours, or a live-in arrangement. Ask what that caregiver may and may not do, and keep the medicines question inside safe medicine management — reminders are a caregiver task, changing what has been prescribed is not.
The one page you should keep
On a single sheet, in the folder: medicines as prescribed with their timings, the treating doctor’s contact, any allergies, the emergency contact who answers at 2am, what calms your parent when they are distressed, and what upsets them. Update it monthly. It is what you read out at a clinic on the day you are too tired to remember.
Expect one bad week inside the four. Refusal, a disturbed night, the same question forty times — that is the pattern, not a setback. Note what happened before it, and mention it at the next visit.
Related reading
If the routine is already more than the family can carry, do not wait for a crisis to find out what support costs. Use the matcher at /find-a-caretaker/ to see the types of caregiver who cover these hours, and what families in your city typically pay for them.
FAQ
Common questions
Should we tell the person they have dementia?
How much to say, and when, is a judgement call that belongs with the treating doctor and the family together. Some people take the news calmly; others become anxious or refuse it. Ask the doctor for guidance before you have the conversation, and do not force one large disclosure if smaller, gentler explanations work better at home.
How do we stop my parent from wandering at night?
Start with plain measures: a night light on the path to the bathroom, a toilet that is easy to find and easy to use, and a main door that opens noisily so someone notices. Do not lock your parent inside a room. If wandering continues, or the person has already left the house once, talk to the treating doctor the same week.
Will a trained caregiver manage the behaviour better than we can?
Often, because they are not emotionally involved and have done it before. Families frequently find that resistance to bathing or dressing drops when a familiar caregiver does it gently at the same hour each day. Look at dementia care as an arrangement where family keep the relationship and hand over the daily tasks.
Related reading
Sources and further reading
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