What are the differences between care at home and care at a facility?

I think about care as rungs on a ladder. The first step is usually that the caregiver is gonna need some respite, some time away, maybe not 24 hours but maybe 4 hours or 4 hours twice a week or 2 days a week or whatever we decide is gonna be best. So the first rung on that ladder is usually in-home care and so it depends on where you live, but I can say that in the United States in the Arizona area that costs about 20 or 25 dollars an hour but I have a lot of resources or I’ve purchased long-term care insurance, then staying at home, even having full-time care might be an option for me. But for many people, it’s not and so we might look at other options. Another early rung on the ladder would be adult day programming activity, Programming specific to people with memory loss whereby they can get some activity and stimulation and the caregiver can also get six or eight hours off for the day and so that’s another option on the early early stages of implementing care. Assisted living is really up the family and the circumstance. It may be that a daughter is retired and she’s taking care of her mom who is aging and has dementia and she’s able to dedicate a lot of time to caregiving and maybe she feels well-equipped physically and emotionally to do it and might be able to take care of her maybe through the end with just implementing some in-home care. But for most people that’s not so realistic, you may have a spouse or partner, a spouse taking care of a spouse or partner and they’re both in their 60s but often the cases I see they’re in their 70s, 80s, and 90s so you have older people taking care of older people and so it’s probably not realistic. So sometimes they want to move into a community together and again it really just depends on costs I mean assisted living really runs the gamut and we live in Arizona so I can just speak to those numbers but assisted living can run anywhere from 2,000 up to 8 or 9,000 dollars a month and the same goes for in-home care. If you multiply 25 by 24-hour care you’re going to get a big number, so a lot of it is based on how fit the caregiver is, how manageable the person with dementia is, and what the finances are like.