The Complete Guide To Alzheimer's Proofing Your Home

The Complete Guide To Alzheimer's Proofing Your Home is a book that will profoundly improve the environmental quality of caring for a person with Alzheimer's at home.

Author: Mark L. Warner

Book Review 1

By: Geri Richard Hall, Ph.D. c., ARNP, CNS Gerontology Clinical Nurse Specialist Mayo Clinic Scottsdale

A Complete Guide to Alzheimer's Proofing Your Home is a comprehensive practical guide for helping in-home caregivers and health professionals who advise them, to evaluate the home environment and make modifications enhancing safety and function. Easy to read, the book offers the reader numerous new ideas on every page, each with the potential solve some small yet vexing problem. The book begins with an overview of how to evaluate the rooms and exterior areas of a typical home and how to formulate a plan that facilitates maximum function for both the care-recipient and caregiver.

A strength of the book is the second chapter. It provides a disease overview focusing on symptom presentation and how it affects day to day function. This is particularly helpful for the caregiver as it explains how a symptom/behavior is represented in their home. Quotes familiar to professionals working with families help caregivers to recognize how this relates to their own situation. These quotes help to give the book focus and direction, but more important, the quotes provide a very empathetic and "human" touch and make the book highly readable. I find this approach much more salient than "academic approaches" to the description of dementia.

Another strength is the glossary of terms, which is comprehensive and simple to understand. It can help the caregiver speak with health care professionals or understand recommendations - a problem even when the professional speaks in the simplest possible terms. A last strength is the recommendation of products designed for people with AD or for other purposes, but work well for people with AD. The authors have included a shopping guide for convenience of the reader. While this will need to be updated every few years, it is an invaluable resource.