D
EMENTIA RESPONSIVE behaviors require a good understanding of the services that are available to help the person with dementia and his or her caregiver(s) so that appropriate referrals may be made and services located and useful information accessed. A truly dementia responsive professional service clearly sees the caregiver as “the invisible second patient” as referred to by Henry Brodaty and Marika Donkin in the 2009 NIH research paper titled Family Caregivers of people with dementia. That paper can be viewed at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181916/ Recognizing the caregiver as the invisible second patient would open the door to a more realistically effective service model that identifies meeting the needs of the caregiver as necessary as those of the care recipient in order to keep the entire caregiving plan afloat.
“Recognizing the caregiver as the invisible second patient would open the door to a more realistically effective service model that identifies meeting the needs of the caregiver as necessary as those of the care recipient in order to keep the entire caregiving plan afloat.”