Specialist service · Altrincham branch
Dementia care at home in Altrincham
Nineteen families in WA14, WA15 and M33 currently have a dementia package with us. Every carer who walks through their door has completed Priya's six-day programme before they ever meet a client — not an online module, six days in a room with a trainer.
What actually changes
Dementia care is not personal care with a different label
Most providers charge a premium for "dementia care" and deliver the identical visit. Here is precisely what is different about ours, and you are welcome to hold us to every line.
- A maximum of three carers on the rota, ever — familiarity is the single biggest predictor of a calm visit
- Visits at the same clock time each day, because routine does more for agitation than any medication
- A life-story document built with the family in the first fortnight — jobs, children's names, the football team, the dog in 1974
- Sundowning cover — we deliberately keep late-afternoon slots free, the hardest hours to staff and the ones that matter most
- Carer notes written for you, not for an auditor — what they ate, what they said, whether it was a good day
The six-day programme
What every Altrincham carer learns before their first dementia visit
Run in-house by Priya Raman, who has been our quality lead for nine years. No new carer meets a client with dementia until they've done all six.
Understanding the types
Alzheimer's, vascular, Lewy body and frontotemporal behave differently. Treating them the same is where most poor care starts.
Communication
How to ask, when not to correct, why "do you remember" is the most damaging question in the language.
Distress & behaviour
Reading agitation as communication. De-escalation without restraint. What to do at the door when you're refused entry.
Eating, drinking, medication
Swallowing risk, dehydration signs, and prompting without forcing. The commonest avoidable hospital admission.
Life-story work
Building the document with the family, then actually using it. A carer who knows about the 1966 season has a different visit.
Supporting the family
The daughter is a client too. Recognising carer burnout, and knowing when to say "you need a fortnight off".
Cost, in full
Dementia care in Altrincham: the real numbers
The £1.50 premium over standard personal care pays for the training and the tighter rota. That's the whole reason for it.
Daily visits
One to four calls a day
per hour weekday · £35.40 weekend
- Maximum three named carers
- Life-story document included
- No charge for the 90-minute assessment
Morning, tea & bed
Three visits a day, every day
per week · 21 hours including weekends
- Deliberate late-afternoon slot for sundowning
- Same clock time daily, weekends included
- Family app notes after every single visit
- Six-weekly review with Siobhan
Live-in dementia care
When visits are no longer enough
per week · dementia-trained live-in carer
- Typically £400–£700/week under a Trafford dementia nursing bed
- The house, the chair and the routine all stay the same
- Two-week trial, cancel with no penalty
Altrincham dementia families
Three local families, in their own words
Dad was refusing the door. Siobhan came out twice with nothing to sell, just sat in the kitchen. When care started it was two carers only, never anyone else, and they'd learned he'd been a signalman at Navigation Road. Eight months on he calls one of them "the tall lad" and waits by the window on Tuesdays.
Paul AdeyemiSon · Sale Moor · January 2026
The life-story book sounded like a gimmick and I said so. Then a carer got Mum through a bad afternoon by talking about the guest house they ran in Llandudno in the seventies — something I hadn't mentioned in years and had frankly forgotten mattered. I stopped being cynical about it that day.
Cathy RowntreeDaughter · Hale · November 2025
What sold it was Priya letting me sit in on a day of the training. I've worked in the NHS thirty years and it was better than most of what I've been sent on. They also told me plainly that if Mum deteriorated past a certain point, live-in or a home would be safer than visits — a company willing to talk itself out of £400 a week is a company I trust.
Andrew BeckettSon · Bowdon · May 2026
Dementia questions
What Altrincham families ask us
£33.00 an hour on weekdays and £35.40 at weekends, with a minimum visit of one hour. Three visits a day, seven days a week — the commonest dementia package here — comes to £693 a week. Live-in dementia care is £1,495 a week.
That's £1.50 an hour above our standard personal care rate. It pays for the six-day training and for running a deliberately tighter rota, which costs us money in scheduling flexibility.
This is the single most common thing families ring us about, and it is normal rather than a sign that care is impossible. We handle it slowly: Siobhan visits once or twice with nothing to sell, often with you present, so she becomes a familiar face rather than a stranger with a lanyard.
The first few visits are often framed as something other than care — help with the shopping, a hand with the garden. We don't charge for the introduction visits and we don't put a deadline on it. It has taken as long as six weeks and it has worked.
Sometimes, and sometimes not — anyone who answers that question with an unqualified "yes" is selling you something. Familiar surroundings genuinely reduce confusion and agitation, and moving someone with dementia carries a real, documented risk of decline.
But if there is night-time wandering, a fire risk in the kitchen, repeated falls or unmanaged incontinence at night, visiting care may not be enough and live-in or a specialist home can be the safer answer. We will tell you which we think it is, in writing, at the assessment. We have talked families out of home care sixteen times this year.
On dementia packages we cap the rota at three named carers, and in practice most families see two. Across the Altrincham branch, 94% of all visits last month were delivered by a carer that family already knew; on dementia packages specifically it was 97%.
Yes — all of WA14, WA15, M33 and M31, at the same rate with no mileage charge. That includes Hale Barns, Bowdon, Broadheath, Dunham Massey, Brooklands, Ashton on Mersey, Sale Moor and Partington. If you're just outside, ring anyway; we cover Lymm, Knutsford and Wilmslow from the same office.
Ninety minutes, at home, free
A dementia assessment with Siobhan takes about an hour and a half and costs nothing. You'll get a written view of what's needed, what it costs, and whether home care is honestly the right answer — even when it isn't.