Alzheimer’s/ phone use

[WhenAGrapeIsBorn]

Does anyone have any ideas about how to stop my dear Aunt from calling all night. She's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and recently has been calling landlines and mobiles between midnight and 2am and then 4am and 6am. I'm getting frustrated calls from friends and relatives (she doesn't have kids so I'm her power of attorney and looking after her as best I can).
She's calling from her landline and mobile. Before I spend hours on live chat / on the call to BT and O2 are there any ways to restrict who she can call between say 10pm & 8am or do I just have to tell people to make sure their phones are off (obviously not fair on them) Her mobile is not smartphone

Not much help but, my sympathies! My dad once called 36 times in one night! Unfortunately I didn't find a solution, sorry!

@spanieleyes obviously if it was an emergency nobody would mind but it's just nonsense. I was wondering if taking a sleeping pill might help but that's quite an extreme solution I guess

I sympathise. Before she went to a nursing home my mum was calling me multiple times a day especially during working hours despite being asked/begged/told not to. Fortunately she was only ringing my mobile and had forgotten we have a landline so I was able to do a combination of do not disturb (blocking all calls from any number) during the night (can set up automatic schedules for this) and then taking do not disturb off and manually blocking her number during the day as I needed to receive other calls at that time but it was still a bit of a hassle. With do not disturb you can see that the person has called during the dnd period, the phone just doesn't ring or vibrate. My phone is Android but I expect Apple has similar.

Had she been ringing the landline we would have just unplugged it.

I don't know if there is anything you can do to stop it from her end though. I was tempted to get a different phone, give mum that number, destroy all her records of my real number and leave the new phone switched off (or diverted to my useless brother's number). But if your aunt is calling multiple people you can't do that.

@Nixer I have my phone on do not disturb overnight and we've unplugged the landline but it's the others I feel sorry for. I'm desperately waiting for her care needs to be assessed and hoping that we can get something in place to help.
I totally hear you about changing the number and forwarding calls to my equally useless brother as he's golden boy nephew (a whole other thread!)
Does anyone know if the dementia clocks are any good in terms of helping to acknowledge the difference between night and day, maybe that would stop the overnight calls?

Does she know the numbers or have them written down / programmed into the phone?

If written down could you take the book away and swap the phone for one which has just a few preprogrammed numbers that you would be ok for her to call day or night? You could ask everyone else to make sure they call her regularly so she isn't losing contact or if she rings you wanting to talk to someone else you could say you will ask them to call her back (at a reasonable time!)

You can get both mobiles and home phones that are dementia friendly and have maybe 3 -4 buttons with names or pictures next to them.

Oh and dementia clocks can work well as long as people remember to look at them!

www.alzproducts.co.uk/truecall-care-call-blocker-dementia-elderly

You could also try something like this (I quite like this website for gadgets) but again it would stop her calling them at all and it wouldn't help the mobile situation!

Also don't forget she is extremely vulnerable to callers scamming her

If this were my DM I'd just disconnect the phone from the line

Reminds me of confused patients calling the police from their hospital beds…it’s hard to stop imo

If I lived nearby I'd go round daily, weekly or regularly anyway to see if she wanted to call anyone and then plug it back in so she could call at a normal time

It depends if she's ringing in the night because she thinks it's daytime - if she is doing that a dementia clock may help. It's more likely though that she is lonely or anxious and phones people obsessively and is incapable of any empathy or thoughts about whether she is disturbing them. Is there a purpose to the calls - is she worried about something however irrational or non urgent it seems? Or is she just talking utter nonsense?

Unfortunately I don't live that close - 2 hours away otherwise I'd be going in as much as I could. The calls are nonsense, she talks about her welly boots or reads the paper out loud or asks random questions.
I'm going to stay with her for the first weekend in March.
Plan is to take a dementia clock and then delete landline numbers from her phones and make sure her address book doesn't have them in it. I'll leave the mobile numbers of those friends and relatives who are happy to get calls (and know how to use do not disturb) Her landline has a blocker for spam calls. I'm going to call O2 and see if there is anything they can do to protect her mobile.
Any other wonder products / words of wisdom are welcome. Thanks everyone, it's really helped

It would not be difficult to set up a time switch so the phone can only be used between certain times. The problem is that it would stop a genuine 999 call.

We had very limited success with a dementia clock. By the time we realised DMIL was no longer able to distinguish between day and night and we'd got the clock, it was a very quick progression to her wandering at night.

Have you filled in a Herbert Protocol in case she does wander?

@PritiPatelsMaker I'd not heard of that. Will get it sorted ASAP, thanks

Luckily we found DMIL when she was wandering at midnight and the weather was warm. God forbid what would have happened if we'd not found her or the temperatures were colder.