Dementia is a growing concern for our state. Another huge and escalating concern is the people with dementia who are hospitalized and taken out of their routine environments.

During hospital stays, people with this horrific disease end up more confused and, on paper, appear like a behavioral nightmare. It has become a world of black-and-white and yes-or-no.

The kicker is that places that specialize in dementia care are also frightened of who they allow into their buildings. So many times, the answer is “no available bed.”

Dementia should not be labeled so negatively. Some dementia specialists find ways to work with people with dementia and create a failure-free environment by redirecting them, distracting them or validating their feelings.

Certainly we know that people who are taken out of any kind of structure and put in a strange or new place like a hospital have a pretty high chance of experiencing these so-called behaviors: fear, anxiety, depression, yelling, trying to get out of bed, wandering. One thing that may help is getting them out of the hospital and back into a structured environment.

We need to dig for suspected triggers. Ask families, ask centers they came from. We need to suspect and take a risk that if dementia patients were given a chance to be re-introduced into a structured environment with higher levels of care, some of these unwanted behaviors would subside.

Health care professionals need to refocus. We need to retrain. We need to stop judging a book by its “behaviorally disturbed” cover. Ask the right questions and work together as a community and take care of those who desperately rely on us to see them succeed.

Lea Rust

Falmouth