What a residential memory care home is
Most people begin this search looking for a building. The words "memory care" bring up campuses with a lobby, a sign-in book, wings named after trees, and a floor set aside for dementia. A residential memory care home is a different shape altogether. It is an ordinary house on an ordinary street, where a small number of people live and are looked after.
Gianna Homes has worked this way since 1999. There are two houses: Sursum Corda at 4605 Fairhills Road East in Minnetonka, and Gladys' Place at 10210 28th Avenue North in Plymouth. Six people live at Gladys' Place. Everyone has a private room. A full-time registered nurse supports each house, and an RN is on call 24 hours a day. This page explains what that arrangement means in practice, so the rest of the site does not have to keep repeating it.
Scale is the whole difference
In a house with a handful of residents, the people working there do not need a chart to know that your mother takes her coffee black, sleeps on her left side, gets anxious around four in the afternoon, and will do almost anything if you ask her while she is folding towels. They know it because there are few enough people to know.
That is not a small thing dressed up as a large one. Most of what goes wrong in dementia care goes wrong because a change was noticed late, or noticed by someone who did not know what it was a change from. A small house does not fix a disease. It shortens the distance between something being true and someone knowing it.
Care that continues, so you are not doing this twice
Families often make this decision under the assumption that it is temporary, and that another move is waiting somewhere ahead. That second move is one of the hardest things a person with dementia goes through, because by then the house itself is doing a lot of the remembering for them.
Care at Gianna Homes continues through the end of life. Ask us, and ask anyone else you are considering, what would have to be true for that not to be possible. A place that answers that question honestly is telling you something useful. A place that answers it with a promise is not.
The nurse question, asked properly
"We have nursing on staff" can mean a great many things. It can mean a registered nurse who knows every resident by name and their normal by heart. It can also mean a name on a contract who visits on Thursdays.
At Gianna Homes a full-time registered nurse supports each house, and an RN is on call 24 hours a day. When you visit anywhere, ask for the nurse's name, ask when she is in the building, and ask who makes the call at two in the morning about whether your father goes to the emergency room. The specificity of the answer is the answer.
The diagnoses families arrive with
Gianna Homes cares for people living with Alzheimer's disease, Lewy body dementia, Parkinson's disease and frontotemporal dementia. These are not interchangeable conditions, and a home that treats them as one thing called "memory loss" will get some of them wrong in predictable ways.
There is a page here for each of the four. They cover what the condition tends to mean for ordinary days, and the questions it turns into when you are choosing where someone will live. None of them are a substitute for the conversation with her physician.
What to ask on a visit
Ask who is awake at three in the morning and what they are doing. Ask what happens the first time your mother refuses a shower, and then ask what happens the tenth time. Ask how a change gets from the person who noticed it to the person who can do something about it, and how long that takes on a Sunday.
Then ask the question most families do not ask until it is too late to matter: what would make you tell us this is no longer the right place. Every home has an answer. Very few volunteer it.