How did you persuade your parent to accept meal delivery

[iCod]

Of whatever type? My mum's got early dementia that he's getting worse and we think she gets tired because she doesn't eat or buys lots of the same things but as lost all her culinary skill, which was considerable.

We've looked at all different sorts one which is discounted because" it's for council houses"!

Would having a regular care visit ensure she eats? Just someone to make her a meal/remind her to eat/drink? Sending hugs x

We have a local community cafe that also makes and delivers meals. They have a different menu weekly and deliver it warm/cold to be warmed through. We got Mum to consider it by showing her the next week’s menu and she chose one that she fancied. We got a portion for her and one for me, arranged to be at her house for the first delivery and ate it together - lots of positive conversation encouraged!
That led onto ordering 3 main meals per week which she now looks forward to.

She has A Cleaner who is increasingly doing more stuff like driving her to the supermarket and stuff
shes always been chaotic but now coupled with the dementia ...

That's a good idea for me to eat it with her

When my mum had early dementia and started to dig her heels in over stuff, we told her that her gp had recommended it. Eg, walking aids, wheelchair, hearing aids, tea-time carer etc. Felt bad telling fibs but she loved her gp and was as good as gold.

If she has lost her culinary skills I wouldn't bank on her being able to heat up a ready meal. My mother had Wiltshire Farm foods delivered which worked for a short while but she became unable to remember the sequencing to heat them up. She could barely even prepare toast and marmalade (often burned the toast). The only way we got around it was to have a carer in from 9-1 who prepared breakfast and lunch and made sure she ate it (and did a lot of other stuff while she was there too).

hi. No I mean her cooking from scratch skills

Doctor is a great plan!

Hi OP yes I understood what you meant. But with dementia the person also loses sequencing skills which may not be apparent unless you regularly watch them doing a task. They may say they don't want whatever it is, but actually they can no longer do it. I'm just mentioning it as something to look for.

Ah thanks. Thats another delight to look
forward to!

Watching the person I care for (EPICF - elderly person I care for) try to heat canned soup and make toast is one of the scariest things I have ever done.

At this point I decided that all hot food had to be prepped by the carers and isolated the cooker (left microwave/toaster).

I got loads of different stuff to try. Wiltshire farm food meals are OK and cater for an "older" palette and portion size. Cook are pretty good and seemed the best nutritionally (or maybe I swallowed their marketing) but most have to be heated from frozen so depending on arrangement with carers this might not work. I liked some of the Sainsbury's finest options but EPICF found the portions too big and some of the flavour combinations too weird. So we settled on a combo of M&S and wiltshire farm foods (a neighbour went to M&S weekly for her).

We also tried Parsley box (long life). EPICF liked them but I thought they looked so horrible I couldn't eat them when they were left in the house after they went into care.

I initially tried to augment the UPF loaded stuff by prepping "home made" ready meals when I visited (like I do for my own freezer) ie. make pasta bake and freeze the spare portions, and my SIL also gave me some portions of their family meals. However, this was pointless as no-one except me would serve them out of the freezer the carers needed commercially prepared stuff. Carers were in on a council contract. If they had been employed directly by me I might have been able to change this but I'm not sure.

Carers/ Cleaners etc. can be a godsend though - one of my Grandfathers cleaners took to bringing home made soup on her once a week visit which she then heated and ate with him after correctly identifying that he was lonely and there actually wasn't much cleaning to be done as her mate did the bulk of it on the second visit in the week (we were up front when organising this that two visits/week were mostly about spying for remote relatives about what was going on in the house and keeping on top of the dishes). My grandfather really enjoyed this spot of normality in his week.

This cleaner continues to work for friends of mine (they took my grandfather's slot when he died) and still brings food and cake to her clients. Although now she does actually clean as there is stuff to do!

Sent them what you tell them is a free trial of simmer?

DPs local butchers did a good selection of ready meals that looked good and had a decent portion of vegetables. Of course they still managed to make them weird by sharing one between two - large portions but would have been tiny split and freezing them then randomly defrosting so I never had any idea of what needed throwing out from the fridge. Oh and cooking them in the oven when they could be microwaved.Life would have been so much simpler if I could have just ordered them 14 of those per week, but as they both had different sorts of dementia it was almost impossible.

Depending on how often someone is round, you could focus on making sure she has a good meal when you are there, then easy options like toast when you’re not. It’s even more important that they are drinking enough fluids so really push that.

M&S had some nice looking ready meals in small portions which I tried getting for them, but unfortunately DF was unable to cope with anything new, so instead of heating up two, he complained that the packets were awfully small to share because splitting was what he was used to doing.

Unfortunately food and shopping became a huge nightmare in the latter days with my DPs, thankfully now in a home and DF likes the food, DM hasn’t said anything good about it but hasn’t complained which she does incessantly about everything else, so I am guessing it must be ok.

We used Wiltshire Farm Foods to be heated up by visiting carers. Not going to win any Taste of Britain prizes but worked well enough and edible enough the couple I had.

Importantly the driver will deliver to the kitchen and put the food directly into the freezer.

DH's grandma started off with meals from a local lady who was a chef and did "meals on wheels" for the elderly from her own kitchen. She had a weekly menu and you could phone or email or message her Facebook page and order for the week. You could order as few or as many meals as you wanted. She did a lot of "old favourites" like liver and onions and mash, corned beef hash ect as well as cottage pies/ lasagne/ shepherds pie. She also did a lot of "old favourite" steamed puddings and things like pineapple upside down cake and jam roly poly. They came with instructions for freezing and cooking. They were quite an easy sell to grandma because they were things that she hadn't had for a long time but didn't bother making. She started off just ordering the "old favourites" like liver and onions and corned beef hash and cheesey leeks and mash but then moved onto having one a day.

BIL, DH and MIL used to go over and cook the main meal. Grandma lived up the road from MIL and on BIL's way home from work so one of them would pop in and microwave the meal. Grandma was able to manage cereal at breakfast and usually had a sandwich or yoghurt and fruit for lunch.

She did move to Wiltshire farm foods later on before going into the home.