I worked in several facilities with memory care units and in the most humble and the most luxurious settings, consistency of caregivers is always a problem. Consistency is nearly impossible with staff covering three shifts, a staff primarily women with childcare and elder care needs of their own, the difficulty of the job where one can be hit, bitten, screamed profanities at, a job with often heavy physical requirements and unpleasant care tasks that may pay less than your local Walmart.
Putting aside the bottom line that any facility, you would have a relative in, must have an adequate level of cleanliness, quality of food, enough caregivers so basic needs are all met, what I found more important for the mental well-being of folks in Memory Care was the daily schedule of the structured environment. That things follow along in the same way day after day after day. I get up now, pills next, out for breakfast now, I sit here, back to my room going this way, out for an activity always in this area, I sit here. It’s the daily comfort of the daily schedule. The people will change constantly, but they’ll know my name. The other piece of Memory Care is that they do operate on 24 hours in the sense that if the resident is up and about at 3 am, no problem, sit in your spot, have a snack.
My husband has vascular dementia and is in a facility with Memory Care. We live in a college town in a rural county. We are really fortunate in that many of the caregivers are “country women”, lots of mother/daughter/son CNA combinations, student CNA and nurses getting their hours, plus the facility uses the facility van to pick up and drop off staff who need transportation to work (that’s new since COVID).