Looking after his dad at home proved to be a big challenge for Paul.

Paul had no idea of the nature and extent of his role as a carer when he agreed to look after his 84-year-old father, Patrick.

Patrick was not particularly unwell, but had lost his wife recently and felt depressed and lonely in his big old family home, which was just getting too big to look after and was in a poor state of repair, not having had any maintenance done on it for many years.

Paul’s siblings had wanted their father to go into an aged care facility, but Paul was appalled by the idea.

“After everything dad had done for us, I was shocked that my brothers and sisters wanted to put him into an old people’s home,” Paul said.

“It just seemed wrong to me. I didn’t feel I had any choice other than to move him in with me, my wife and our two grown children.”

Pauls said he had received little professional input at the time he made his decision and was not really fully prepared for all that being a carer meant, either physically or psychologically.

Not long after his father moved in with him, he started developing memory loss and began wandering through the day. One day he was found by police about five kilometres from his home, in his pyjamas, and unaware of who he was and what he was doing there.

At first Paul just thought it was the stress of the relocation from familiar surroundings, but after medical assessment it became clear his father actually had well-developed dementia, which had been masked by his wife’s loving attention and care for many years while she was still alive.

“I was totally at a loss in knowing how to deal with the situation,” Paul said “and I was loathe to ask my brothers and sisters for help as they had opposed dad’s move in the first place.

“I felt they would have said ‘see, we told you he was better off in a home’ and I still didn’t want to see dad institutionalised, so I managed as best I could and gained skills and knowledge along the way through a process of trial and error.”

Paul continued working in his job as an electrical contractor, managing a small business, which gave him some flexibility in being able to juggle work hours with his father’s needs, but his dad or the neighbours would often ring with problems that would see him flying home to sort things out.

The business began to suffer and so did his relationship with his wife. The children, both university students, moved out of home as they found coping with the demands of an older person with dementia too distracting from their studies.

Paul was spending more and more time caring for his father, who needed an escalating level of care for all his basic daily needs like showering, meals, taking medication and getting around the community.

“When I tried to get help from various services, I felt I was just fobbed off,” Paul said. “Everywhere I went I was told that there were long waiting lists or that I earned too much money to be eligible for assistance.

“I felt I wasn’t listened to and service providers and government departments were basically not interested in my issues. It was just like ‘it’s your problem, deal with it; you’re one of thousands – join the queue’.

“I wasn’t getting much sleep at night, what with being up to dad at all hours of the night, worrying about how much worse things were going to get and still dealing with all the demands of running my business. I actually got really exhausted and felt I just couldn’t continue anymore.”

Paul decided that there really was no choice other than to seek a place in an aged care facility for his father – but when he made inquiries in his region, he was told that there was a wait of several years for places.

“That’s when I went back to my brothers and sisters and told them everything that had been happening,” Paul said. “They were just fantastic and I was really very, very surprised.

“We were able to all sit down together with dad and come up with a pretty good shared care plan. Dad now spends two weeks with each of us in turn, which is much more sustainable for everyone.

“We have been able to sell the family home and use that money to buy the services we need, so there is care for dad through the day when one of us can’t be with him and we pay people to take him out to his favourite activities.

“I am not at all sure how people cope who don’t have access to private funds, but it has made us all very aware of how vulnerable we will all be in our old age and of the real need to plan for the future as we age.”