Highlands is a specialist Care Home for the Residential and Day care of clients suffering from all varieties of Dementia and is registered as such with the National Care Standards Commission. Alzheimer's Disease is the most common cause but others may be Vascular dementia, alcohol-induced dementia and the rarer forms such as Pick's Disease. The Home is divided into two distinct areas (Park House and Oak House) in adjoining buildings and each meeting different needs. Park House is equipped and staffed for the more dependent sufferer while Oak House caters for those who are, as yet, more socially able. There is communicating access between the two houses.

The Care in the Community Act 1993 has allowed Local Authorities much scope for putting care into people's homes when it becomes necessary but caring for a family member at home with progressive dementia is likely, in time, to become more than most carers can cope with. Highlands is geared to provide the necessary quality care when that time comes. Our staff undergo the training to allow them to cope with the difficult challenges that behaviour and communication can cause in someone with dementia. It is our view that behavioural problems are the product of increasing frustration due to an inability to communicate needs and that the solution lies not in medication but in fostering non-verbal forms of communication that effectively restore the free transfer of information as far as possible. Needs can then be met, frustration reduced and behavioural problems greatly eased.

Anyone who has spent time with a sufferer from dementia will be more than aware that their ability to orientate themselves in time and place is impaired to varying degrees. This has the effect of giving them a different reality from that which we regard as normal. It can produce great difficulties in having even a simple conversation because of the mental dislocation that occurs. It has been the accepted routine that great efforts should be made to remind sufferers of the "here and now" in order to try to re-orientate them. It is our belief that this practice is both misguided and likely to cause confusion with subsequent negative effects on behaviour. We firmly advocate what has become known as validation theory. This says that the effects of dementia are such as to produce a gradual, irreversible change in reality perception which progresses until the sufferer no longer sees the world around them in the same way as we do. They may live in a different time frame and present surroundings may be convincingly seen as a recreation of places lived in during the past. It is pointless to keep telling them this is not so. The confusion it causes is akin to the effects of brainwashing and leads to emotional distress. A more reasonable approach is to accept that - for them, at least - the reality they have is just as valid as our own and to try and enter it so that a meeting of minds can take place on their terms. The adjustment is not easy at first for staff used to reality as a concrete fact but the dividends for care can be well worth the perseverance.

You will have gained from this short resume that our approach to dementia is an empathic, psychosocial one and not pharmacological in essence. Drugs very often do more harm than good in dementia.