When should a parent with Alzheimer's be placed in a memory care unit?

The true deciding factor is the safety of the Alzheimer sufferer. Can he or she really manage in their own home, even with a team of nurses to administer medication, someone to bring cooked meals, someone paid to look after their finances and a family member or close friend taking on the role of the Close Personal Assistant? Even this setup cannot prevent a person from falling and hurting themselves, unable to phone for assistance. Even with health visitors, the patient may regard them as intruders and as a result shut themselves into a bedroom or bathroom until aliens have gone. Even if the sufferer is living in a family home being looked after by the family as carers, falls can still happen, choking fits can happen, and bronchitis and pneumonia can set in fast if anybody at home happens to spread the virus of a common cold.

The best thing to do is to put personal feelings aside and find a nursing or care home where the atmosphere feels friendly and warm, where the staff are kind and patient with the inmates and where a lot of effort is made to keep their spirits up with entertainments, changing decorations to illustrate the seasons, and accompanied visits to sit in a garden on a sunny day. You should not choose just the home that is closest to you. Alzheimer sufferers have absolutely no idea of the passage of time, so afthey won't really notice if you haven't paid the usual weekly visit. If you get the patient to regard the new place as a hotel, it's amazing how quickly they will settle down and become so used to the routine that it will be difficult to take them away "for a treat".

Don't put off the decision to move the patient to a home too long. Patients get stressed when their carers are stressed, and your idea of what makes them happy is not the same as theirs. Patients over the age of 80 will start retreating into themselves anyway. It's the patients in their late 60s and early 70s who will need careful persuasion to move into the "new hotel" and it can be weeks before they stop asking to be driven home and away from their fellow inmates. But give it a few weeks longer, and the "hotel" will have become their home.

Your feelings about this will not matter. For Alzheimer sufferers, the greatest need is security, knowing there is someone on call 24/7 and working out what to do next. If they can't, sleep is often the answer.

My mom was dx'd with dementia, not Alzheimer's, but when we brought her to a Foster Home, she did ok for the first several lweeks then she became 'combative' and threatened to hit someone with her walker. From there she moved into a Memory Care unit that housed people with all forms of dementia, at all different stages. She kept asking why she was here and what were all these people doing and what was wrong with them? My sister and I thought we'd made a mistake but she couldn't go back to the Foster Home, she couldn't return to her condo where she was falling all the time and not remembering or asking for help, and her memory was bad enough that she'd forget where she was at any time of the day. She needed to be in a place in between ALF and a Memory Care as she wasn't quite 'there' when she arrived. I still have a lot of guilt about moving her there and now after 3 years, she's rounding the corner and her 97 years of life is coming to an end. I wish someone would look into researching where people who are right in between these two types of living situations could go.

Quenneannabelle
I'm in total agreement with you - I placed my near 93 year old mom in a leading memory care facility and it is a nightmare - I am now paying for a private caregiver 12 hours a day on top of their high facility fees - all levels of Alzheimer's are placed together and the men especially get quite violent - staff are afraid of them and they're supposed to be memory care experts

my mom who can do math in her head and spell backwards doesn't understand why she's with these folks - when I take her out for a treat or to the doctor she wants to know why I turned down the wrong street to go home - she can draw a map of where she lived for nearly 70 years

Clearly she has memory loss and is easily agitated but
Memory care is no real care - they don't help her get ready fo bed and she fell shortly afte getting there from weakness and dehydration from a UTI - often they don't even put a diaper on her

She is not bedridden but one more fall could change that - she needs a safe place but memory care is scary

A lot of money is being spent on EU-wide studies into how to care for senior citizens with memory-affected diseases. They all widely condemn the current practice in care homes of lumping Alzheimer's patients in together with those suffering from various forms of dementia.
But the answer always comes back: "there is no budget/space" to create parallel safe facilities for those who are lucid between memory lapses and those who are not. They cannot pay for two parallel teams of nurses.
In Belgium, all care homes advertising spaces for Alzheimers sufferers have to pass rigorous new legal requirements. If they fail, they are not allowed to take in people with any stage of Alzheimer's. Over two years this led to a 50% loss in offer of available residential spaces.

Felix - I suggest you find a support group because you DO sound angry to me.
I get angry with my mom. I get angry for many reasons....the same question over and over, or her asking me how to do something that I know full well she knows how. My mom is an alcoholic as well. My mom has Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. It is like Alzheimers or dementia but it was alcohol induced. My mom is a "happy" drunk so we don't have that issue.
The reason my mom doesn't live with me is because I AM NOT DAUGHTER OF THE YEAR and I get frustrated AND angry sometimes.

Sasebone, your original question is: When should a parent with Alzheimer's be placed in a memory care unit? As far as I can tell, maybe never; depends on what the person is doing. Consistently hitting or repeated escape attempts require memory care, or at least a locked down unit. Some have walking paths out back that are fenced and escape-proof for folks to 'escape'. My mother has been in assisted living facilities after she broke her hip then got a horrible gut disease in rehab. I moved her each time her care level required more help that the place was able to provide. As you tour various places take note of the type of people already residing there. Some ALFs are party-towns, some are indoor activity specialists with great activity directors, some specialize in care of wheelchair users. Close supervision on your part, or other family members/friends seems to be really important. But balance it with surviving for yourself. We are ourselves really sandwiched in between dementia in the older generation and mental illness in the younger generation. No way out, just keep on keeping on. The government is not out to help you. They want to transfer all the expenses on to you. And they do a darn good job of it, too. My parents played and traveled and boated for years in retirement. No such luck for me. It's just how it is.