Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t get Carer’s Allowance because I earned too, you, you can only, I work the right amount of hours, you can only work 16 hours a week but you can only earn, well at the time you could only earn £100 a week and I earned just over £100 a week so I couldn’t get carer’s allowance, but Attendance Allowance he got. And we also got because we lived together so we didn’t have to pay for a television licence, which I thought was a bit weird because he didn’t watch the telly, we did [laughs] but I did, you know, I did say, “Well it’s OK, we, you know, we’re a whole family living there.” But they said, no, we didn’t have to pay and we got 25% off the [sighs] council tax.

I did approach the Water Board because they do, do discounts, depending on your needs, for hygiene care, but although my dad was needing regular baths because of his continence issues and I did again argue the toss to main, you know, to maintain his skin integrity he needed proper hygiene care but they weren’t buying it you literally can only get money off if you had certain types of eczema and psoriasis you know, it was a condition label rather than a what was required label but I tried.

I mean the Citizens’ Advice Bureau is a good place to go if you’re concerned about whether you’re eligible for certain support as is the Department of Work & Pensions, as I’ve mentioned. The local authority in [county] also has a benefits team who, who will give you a free assessment of what benefits you’re entitled to, depending on the disability that the person has who’s, who’s looking for support. There’s different types of benefits that you can get to contribute towards if you have got to self-fund that isn’t means tested as well. So yeah, that’s something that people can look into.

So it’s worth looking for, even if you’re a self-funder it’s worth looking at these places for extra information?

Yeah, it’s, it’s always best to check to see if there is any more help that you’re entitled to. It’s like I had to persuade my dad to apply for Attendance Allowance, because he’d always been one that he’d never ever had benefits or ever applied for anything off the government all of his life, and why would he want to do that? But I explained that, “Well actually, you know, people get a lot more help and support if they’ve not got money so just because you’ve not got the – sorry – just because you’ve got the money, dad, you can still get that help and support that mum’s entitled to.” She’s still entitled to that Attendance Allowance regarding how much money they’ve got and my dad has been pleased with that because he sees that as going towards the cost of the care.

The Alzheimer’s Society were fantastic in helping me get mum’s Attendance Allowance, because the first time I applied for that we weren’t successful because there is an art in writing these, and actually one of the hardest things to do is to write about your parent, so the Alzheimer’s Society were invaluable in helping me do that.

Dad’s, anyway he was, he was awarded Attendance Allowance at the higher rate and so he then which included having, you know monitors and everything in the house; so we’ve got all that in; and he’s paying for care, he’s paying for somebody to come in every morning to make sure he has his medication and his breakfast and he’s loving it.

Yeah, I just, I just wish we’d had more guidance from somebody; I don’t know whether it should have been from the NHS or from Social Care about, you know, what we could do and where we could go and at what point we should apply for higher level atten, you know, there was nobody sort of checking in on how things were going and, as I say, was that my fault, did I, you know, should we have been asking for that or more or, you know, it would have been, but it would have been nice to, you know, somebody; they knew that my mum and dad both had Alzheimer’s and were living at home, and to have more support for us as a family going through this whole process would have, would have been, would have been good.