Mums gone wandering again

[wonkylegs]

Mum has dementia, lives alone but has carers 4times a day
Physically fine, short term memory abysmal, can usually find her way home but can't tell me where's she's been
She's gone walkabout this morning and missed her lunchtime carer, I'm sure she's just popped into town (she doesn't have a mobile)
I'm sure she's fine but at a bit of a loss as to what to do
I live 300 miles away so can't just jump in the car and look for her and my usual person I call to pop in on her is away on holiday this week
We are looking at homes for her because it's getting more and more difficult but she's only 73 so it's hard to find a place that is a good fit as "they are full of old people"

You are in a difficult situation and it is probably not going to get any better. If you don't do anything you will find her going missing more and more so you should probably be thinking about doing something sooner rather than later.

Does she acknowledge her condition? Does she accept that her living arrangements will probably have to change?

Is there any family local to her or any part of the family she could live with for a while? Unfortunately the long term future is not good so you should do some research and start planning now.

My Mum was in the same position and "too young to go into an old folks home" but she never acknowledged her problem so it was difficult to get her to explore possibilities. In our case she passed away before having to move out.

Any news @wonkylegs??

Hope she’s safely back home now.

What about a GPS tracker?

Does DM always carry her handbag? Something the carers could charge overnight and make sure is tucked into her handbag.

Multiple ones - stash another in her coat...

Sorry got caught up with phone calls to everybody to look for her , then too tell them she was back
Got her back 'I only popped up the road to the park, I don't know you made such a fuss'
She was gone for 4.5hrs, missed 2 carer visits, lunch and her morning class and she wasn't at the park as her carer checked there. I don't worry too much if it's a nice day as she has a good homing instinct, and still has road safety but because she's got council carers if she misses anything it triggers a whole process and I spend the day fielding calls, ringing round to try and find her and then have to do a review with her social worker usually asking really helpful questions like 'where did she go?' - no idea, why did she go? - because she felt like it and then a massive usually not helpful 'risk assessment'

We did look into a tracker a while back but she won't wear one and doesn't reliably take a particular bag/coat etc

I'm going with my brother to look at homes in a week or so but it's tricky as we both live so far away.

She can't move in with family, and I don't think she'll move well as she doesn't lay down new memories anymore so we are trying to find somewhere she can move once. She still has friends and regular activities that she enjoys where she lives so we'd like to keep her close to there so she can keep those familiar connections
She has no connections with my part of the world and can be very rude about 'not understanding what they are saying up there' so I wouldn't really bring her up here.

With much searching I found a tracker that might work for mum, it's pretty tiny and is on a silver necklace chain so does look like a piece of jewellery, in fact I think she's got something fairly similar already.
I'm going to see her next weekend so I've got a week to figure it out by trialling it on my kids!

You can get a little disc one that can be concealed in the sole of a shoe, but it'd still cost quite a bit to have one in the sole of every pair of shoes that she wears to go out in.