Nursing home in London

[Spaceman1]

My mother has Alzheimer's and has been having live in care but she is now having trouble standing up. The carer has said it may be best for her to go into a nursing home soon.

Can anyone recommend a nice nursing home in South West London?

Whereabouts in SW, I know a lovely one in Surrey. Will she pay for it herself, has she had a full reassessment of her needs by a registered health professional,.

It's called Spiers House in New Malden

Have a look on Carehome.co.uk. You can filter by area and what sort of home she needs. There are lots of reviews on there and you can also see CQC scores and reports of the homes. Good luck in your search!

Also ask Social Services for an assessment.

@YesMeLady thank you for your recommendation, my mother is in Putney so Surrey might be ok.

She is self funded and I was hoping for personal recommendations rather than looking at the assessment tables.

Social Services? Rotten to the core.

Esp in Surrey - totally corrupt.

If you want examples, I'll post them.

The White House in New Malden had good reviews. My late mother never went there, but we were recommended it by Kingston Hospital after her care home - Galsworthy House in Kingston - unexpectedly pitched up a day before her discharge to lobby for more money upon her return, using the meeting to nab more cash. They were disgusted with them. But The White House - which got an Outstanding from the CQC, admittedly a wholly rubbish and also corrupt regulator - has no real nice parks nearby.

Seven care homes in six years - I can't really recommend any esp as many have a proactive attitude to end-of-life care.
There are no real review websites. Negative reviews are not accepted, unless very perfunctory and poorly articulated.
Self-funding helps but the main thing is to ensure you have LPA in Health and Welfare before you let a relative within sniffing distance of a care home, and they should obv have the vaccine first too, hold out for the Oxford one is my suggestion but that's another thread.

Not sure I've heard of Spiers House. CQC reports are often months out of date, make sure you go to them to get the up to date one, they don't post negative reports for over half a year as part of a cover up. They're complicit with the care homes, that's just the way it is.

@NewspaperTaxis thanks for your message, my mother didn't write an LPA for Health and Welfare but hopefully me and my sister would be consulted for any difficult decisions.

I will give the White House a call if you thought it was good.

I suppose the whole Covid thing is the deal now and if you can hold off for a month at least, that would be good.
Find out what the visiting hours are of any home. Some are a bit tight, you can't just turn up. I guess find out how they deal with the Covid stuff - have vaccinations taken place, has your Mum had the jab btw, and are you allowed to visit.
My own experience is that we couldn't get anyone to give Mum drink so we had to turn up daily to do that. Later I suspected what was going on - that it was some kind of Liverpool Care Pathway type thing - but damned if you could do anything about it, you had to count yourself lucky you wouldn't get barred for raising concerns.
So you may need to visit daily to give drink. If you're unable to do that, and the outlook does not look good.
Covid outbreak in the care home? You may think, right, Mum is better off back home, and I will look after her. Sadly, without LPA, it is not your decision to make and she can be forcibly kept at the care home where, should she catch Covid and die, nobody gets into trouble.
Social Services will likely take the side of the care home and say it is no longer safe for her to return home. That it's also not safe in the care home is not really their problem it's yours. Meetings may be held, the clock runs down, then it's too late.
Not saying that will happen. Saying it can.

I''ll admit Surrey Social Services turned on me after I took the case of one care home to the local press, so I have a jaundiced/informed view. But I was astonished at that it turns out they can get away with.

Does mum have capacity to make the decision to move, if she doesnt and you dont have LPA I think you have to apply for Deputyship to act on her behalf. Has the doctor seen her to find out why she cannot walk, it might be worth speaking to the doctor. There might be a community matron or elderly care multi disciplinary group at her surgery who can visit her, if you think she will be safer in a carehome she should have a care needs assessment, a financial assessment and a capacity assessment. The homes will need it to decide if they can offer the right level of care. The cqc reviews can be out of date and normally you would visit first but that's not possible atm. Could she stay at home with extra care and home alterations.

In theory you can apply for the Deputyship. In practice, you don't have a hope in hell of getting it. Speak to any solicitor and they'll tell you the same.
We had Epsom & Ewell's so-called Safeguarding head 'offer' to help us get the Deputyship. Along with her 'kind' offer to help us get Mum back home (totally bogus, they had no intention of allowing this) it was a nonsense and we knew how hard it would be to get that, so we knocked her back and she was a bit miffed!
Later we found out they were stitching us up but that's another story - I think they were trying to attain the Deputyship themselves so they could have me barred from seeing Mum and sort of toy with the situation.
You can get the Deputyship in Finance - this is more or less allowed simply for practical purposes. Again, it takes ages and they all eke it out.

It's telling isn't it that once again we seem to have someone who - like us - has never really been forewarned about the importance of LPA.

Fortunately I have LPA for my mum's financial affairs so I can pay for her carer etc but not one for her health decisions. She signed a short document saying she didn't want to be resuscitated. It has been working fine but I realised that if she stops being able to stand on her own or walk then we are going to the next level of care and she may need a hoist to get into and out of bed and it may be too much for the carer at home. I do also visit a lot as a well to help out. She is no longer able to say what she wants but before she did say she wanted to stay at home.

I have regular calls with her doctor and a district nurse also sees her from time to time. There is a short set of stairs from her room to the living room so she could have a chair lift installed.

It does worry me that the nursing home may take over her medical decisions, not something I had considered at all.

Stairlifts are not always safe if someone has no balance and modt hoists require 2 carers. Could the house be changed around to have the bed downstairs. I would.call her gp or nurse to have her assessed. If you already have poa for finances it might help to get deputyship. Have you rung the OPG for their advice. Decisions around where she lives can go through the court of protection.

Do you think the GP could force her to go into a nursing home if he felt the flat was no longer suitable for her needs? I hadn't considered that.
Maybe if two people are needed for a hoist, someone could visit to help a couple of times a day? Maybe that wouldn't be enough?

My personal advice is slightly stay off the radar and see what you can sort out for the time being, yes, have her downstairs if possible. But that advice may be wrong. It's just, once they're involved, they're involved.

It wouldn't be the GP so much. It's Social Services. If the GP crosses Social Services they're dead. That's the power structure, I've found.

I take it you can't move in for the time being.

I'm not aware that having LPA for Finance gives you any better chance of getting the Deputyship.

Actually, I don't mean to put the frighteners on you, it's just a case of hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Not everyone has the bad time I had with Surrey Social Services. And tbf, they were going for me because they saw me as a whistleblower after I took a care home to the local press.

No one will force her into moving, a best interest decision is made if someone cannot make their own decisions. She needs a full assessment of her needs, our surgery have a team of elderly care staff who do this in someones home and make recommendations about what help they need, can it be at home, is it safer in a carehome. My mum has managed to stay at home with house alterations and equipment. Dont be scared to contact social services if you need to, there should be a community occupational therapy and physiotherapy team in her area and the gp is a good place to start, she may need a gp visit anyway if she is getting weaker. I am not sure what you mean by carehomes taking over medical decisions, what decisions.

www.dementiauk.org/get-support/diagnosis-and-next-steps/sources-of-support-and-advice/

I had this with my mum and my Aunt, both of whom I had next of kin for.

With mum, we managed to keep her at home with a (privately funded) live in carer and a care package from social services, after a hospital visit, coming in to help to hoist her twice a day.

Because she lost mobility, it seemed that she was going to have to have care visits every 2 hours to turn her and it was going to be outside the care package and prohibitively expensive, but we managed to buy a Toto matress which turns the patient by gently inflating and deflating every 2 hours. It paid for itself in 6 weeks, as it meant she did not need as many care visits particularly at nightime.

So it is possible to keep someone at home - and the live in carer was not much more expensive than the local good care homes.

With my Aunt, however, we had to give in, and let her go into a home, because of some additional care needs. It was just too tricky to manage from home. The care home wasn't dreadful.

Is Beaconsfield too far away for you? I knew someone in the Sunrise home there who was very happy, though that was a while ago, and it certainly isn't cheap.

Best of luck on this next stage in your journey. Maybe you could explore whether you can provide a carer at home, along with equipment provided by local authority (hospital bed, hoist, recliner chair, raised toilet seat etc. Some local authorities are much better than others. )

@Notverygrownup thanks for your message. I know my mother wanted to stay at home. Lots of good ideas here that would enable us to do that for her.

I’m sure there are good and bad experiences - and NewspaperTaxis experience sounds awful. So just to provide some balance I can say that we had to move MIL into a care home last summer when her Alzheimer’s got to the point that even 24 hour care at home wasn’t sufficient. It has been such a relief - she is happy and settled and well looked after. The live in carers were all lovely and doing their best but being on your own with an Alzheimer’s patient who doesn’t sleep through the night is really hard work - I don’t think we appreciated just how hard it was. The downside is that because of Covid we have not been able to visit much at all - but given that MIL doesn’t have any awareness the visits were always for our benefit not hers. The home is very good at keeping us informed and has a Facebook page that is updated daily. My sister in law was very reluctant to move her mum - she is sure MIL wouldn’t have wanted to leave her home. But even SIL is certain we’ve done the right thing now. It’s eye wateringly expensive but I can honestly say I no longer worry about a call from the carer about yet another crisis - they were becoming increasingly frequent.

Forgot to say - the home is in Hampshire so probably too far for you but I’m sure there are other good ones around.

@MrsWobble3 thanks for your message. My mother has a lovely live in carer but it must be hard for her. She is very experienced which helps but as you say the illness is so unpredictable. Nice to hear you have had a good experience overall with a nursing home.

Ashmead in Putney is brilliant.