Andrew
Andrew is a 41 year old gentleman who attends Scopze one day a week and Idea Services, Harker Day Base four days a week. Andrew has been a long-time client of DRC living life connected and moved over to Scopze as his support needs have increased.
Unfortunately, Andrew, like a few of our clients, has been diagnosed with the first stages of Alzheimer’s.
For as long as Andrew has been a client DRC living life connected, he has had trouble with time keeping. Andrew is very methodical and repeats the same routine each time he is with us. An example of this is at lunch time where he will wash his hands, make a cup of tea, empty the dishwasher or look for things to put in it, set his lunch out, drink his tea and then make another one, eat his lunch, clean up, make another cup of tea and go to the toilet. This does take him a long time and quite often he is late for an activity or misses out on an outing as he will not deviate from his routine.
We have been trying to help Andrew with this issue in various ways, such as giving him more time, but have not had a lot of success. On talking with the people who work with Andrew at Idea Services, they advised they are having the same issues. We wondered if the purchase of a timer may help. We decided to give this a try with some startling results.
For each task, we set the timer with a given amount of minutes. Andrew watches it closely and when the bell rings, he will go on to the next task without prompting. This has had a positive impact for Andrew and now that he is finished on time, he has started chasing up the other clients and staff if they are not ready when he is.