coming up the luxury and the monotony keeps her calm keeps her happier than she otherwise would be intensive care for the most vulnerable people are flocking here they're our guests and that's how we treat them it's a success in Thailand what is it like here fabulous so why can't it work in Australia the industry has been crying out for decades fix the problem and to give more help to people hi Lolly I love you I love you like my mom [Music] next the weather's spectacular the pool always inviting the rooms have all the modc cons and the food well it's as good as you'll get anywhere at the Vio Benet Resort in Thailand pampering is the priority the Intensive Care is very deliberate but this is no ordinary holiday paradise and that's because the guests are elderly and most have dementia unlike other aged care facilities though treatment is not dominated by medication instead it includes love laughter and giving people with dementia the time and respect they

deserve. So why can't there be similar places in Australia? Every day is Another Day in Paradise for the guests staying at this lavish Resort in Northern Thailand. Winter in Thailand, cheers to that. Cheers from morning meditation, relax your body, and your mind, and your soul to mckown making at happy hour. What is it like here? Fabulous. It looks and feels like they're on holidays, but they're not. Come on, you lazy boys. Come on. They live here at Viva Benet because they have dementia, and this is where their families believe they'll get the best care in the world. Why does the lifestyle here suit you? Um, it suits me most of all because of the quantity of care that's available here. I know that Theresa has someone with her from 6:00 in the morning until 10 at night, and in the future, if I needed to make that 24 hours, I can. We go for a walk, and then we'll go to the market. Come on. It's a level of care James Wise couldn't find for his wife.

Theresa back home in Australia sit down very good. They moved here from Canberra in November 2022. Okay, when her dementia rapidly progressed, we go for a walker. And they're not the only ones. Changmai is full of resorts like this where Australians have brought their sick loved ones because they're desperate to avoid our failing aged care system. One of our neighbors was moved into an aged care home in Canberra, but for a large part of each day, the patients there were left by themselves. They were alone. And for Theresa, that was, I think, the thing more than anything which worried her about being in a home like that, the loneliness, being alone. Our staff have the time to spend with the guest. It's also a big part of the reason why nurse Brad Roberts came to Changmai. You're living the dream. I'm living the dream too. Yes, absolutely yes. The nursing homes he managed in Australia feel like a world away from the round-the-clock life of luxury here in Thailand. This is how it's meant to be.

this is how our elders should be cared for. This is what they deserve. So if we can do it over here in Thailand, in a developing country, it saddens me that Australia can't even come close at the moment. Brad says the real beauty here is that there is more staff and therefore more time to properly look after people. So in Australia, typically you'll have one care worker, um, to maybe 8 to 10 or even more, uh, residents. The care can be compromised because, um, there's just not enough hands on deck. And here, how many do they have to look after? Anywhere from one staff member to three guests, right up to one staff member for one guest, 24 hours a day. You call the people here guests. Why? They're our guests at the resort, and that's how we treat them. Between her husband and her carer, Theresa always has someone by her side. A lot of the time, she has both. The couple has had Brey together almost every day of their 44-year marriage. Only now it's missing the most.

important ingredient conversation. What breaks your heart the most about this journey? The thing is, there's just nothing else you can do. You feel like a widower, but you still have a wife. That's, and that's the best way I can describe it. You feel like you've been grieving for years already, yeah, but the person's still there. It's a feeling I know all too well. Hello, how are you? You good? My Mom Lorraine has had dementia for more than a decade and now lives in a nursing home in Sydney. I missed you. I missed you. Did you? Yeah, M. We've had to watch mom, who always looked after us, slowly surrender to her fading mind. Mama, I love you. I love, I love you. I love you. I love you too. I love you. I love you, Mama. I love you. I know with my mom, you're constantly getting used to a new normal. So yes, what has that look like for you? Um, it's, well, you go through different stages, but the thing that you think most about is, how is this all going to

end. And if I could change, you know, what might happen in the future, it would be that it ends without pain, without discomfort. Do you like coffee? Yes, please. No matter where you are in the world, the cruel reality of dementia is the same. Nice, nice, nice. How good a coffee. You love your coffee, don't you? You love your coffee. You've got no idea how long the road is going to be. The only certainty is that there is no getting better. One of the biggest questions I've always had is, what is actually happening inside my mom's brain? Look over here. This is a healthy brain. And over here, we're looking at a brain that's got quite advanced dementia. It's a question Professor Bryce Vell is asked all the time. We're trying to work out how to rescue the nerve cell connections where memory is stored. He's the head of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney. So no one's done this. No, are you serious? And he's now able to show us exactly how the

disease eats away at your memory. If you look at the brain of someone who's got advanced dementia, you can see that there's quite a lot of brain tissue that has been lost. You can see the opening up here of the ventricles because we lost a lot of brain tissue around here. We are losing where we store our memories and memory function, and we go from a structure that looks like this over to here where you can see that it's been profoundly shrunk. So in essence, your brain shrinks when you have dementia. That's correct. And of course, because the brain is the seat of who we are, where we think and how we feel, how we communicate, how we talk, you must understand that the person is no longer who they were. So much of who they are is literally gone. With no cure and only two medications approved for trial, it all comes down to care. How am I going? Am I going all right? Yeah, you're doing a fine job. Happy days, mate, for the person with dementia.

for their family, and that's where Chang Ma is leading the world. Well, you need a break from the responsibility of constantly caring. James doesn't have to worry about leaving Theresa behind at the resort to get some critical rest. Fight. It's one of the real attractions of being up here is that I can have a life in and be confident that Theresa is being looked after. And why can't you have that same confidence back in Australia? Because in Australia, I would know that when I'm not there for most of the day, she would be by herself. Here, I am confident that for the whole time I'm away, she has someone taken care of her. Your arm outside, your arm. It's a level of devotion. Brad Roberts says carers in Australian nursing homes want to give but can't because the country's aged care sector is in crisis. It's okay. They need to do something yesterday. What's the problem? Why are they waiting so long? Why is the government taking so long? The industry has been crying out for decades.

fix the problem. Fix it. The reality is that the cost of setting something like this up here in Thailand would be astronomical. In Australia, sure, the only way it's going to happen is that the politicians finally please inject some money into aged care. That's the only way it's going to happen. We need more people, and then you can have good quality care. She was always smiling. I hardly ever saw her cry. Unfortunately, good quality care is something that too often seems impossible to find in Australia. These pictures are confronting to look at. Coming up, how our nursing homes are failing our most vulnerable. She was so frightened, and it just broke my heart. From hearty homemade food to fresh fruit and veggies, there are many reasons to come to the night markets in Chiang Mai. Was Theresa a good cook? She was a very good cook, in fact. But James and Theresa Wise are here for so much more than that. It's precious time together, even though Theresa won't remember it. She has dementia. What were the points of

deterioration that have really stuck with you just not being able to discuss anything not being able to have conversations um that you used to have she used to be curious about the world about what's happening in the world there's some prawns as her husband who's been with her for decades how do you cope with that you're shocked by it uh but then after a while you realize that this is a one-way Street you have to think entirely for her because she can no longer think for herself it's been 16 months since James made the difficult decision to move from Cambra to this care Resort in Northern Thailand unlike many nursing homes in Australia Viva Benet can look after Theresa one-onone 24 hour hours a day the beauty of this place for someone with Alzheimer's is the luxury and the monotony it's everything's the same her day every day is the same and it keeps her calm keeps her happier than she otherwise would

be it's what Pia Shindler wanted for her mom Lucy who died from dementia last year. It's a very long goodbye with dementia, a very long goodbye. Pia thought an aged care facility would be the safest place for her mom and says the first few months went smoothly. But as Lucy's dementia worsened, she became aggressive and violent, and the staff had no idea how to handle her. There was one occasion I was called in there at um 3:00 a.m. in the morning, and mom was on a rampage. The staff on that occasion were inside the closet, linen closet. They'd locked themselves there in a cupboard, yeah, yeah, hiding, hiding. Yeah. When you saw your mom, what did you say to her? Mama, it's me, it's Pia, it's me. Um, that's all I just kept saying. I mean, she was quite frail, um, at that point. It's no wonder Lucy was scared. After each episode, she'd be left covered in bruises from the staff and emergency services trying to restrain her.

she's been battered. What is it about seeing those bruises and looking at this picture that is not okay to you? It's not okay because I feel like there were steps that were missed prior to this. Um, steps missed in terms of her medication, um, behavioral changes, um, types of care that might have been required at different stages for her. Um, um, this was just, you know, one of the occasions where this happened to her. The Awful Truth is this happens every day in aged Care Homes around Australia. Doing good, huh? It's why nurse Brad Roberts left and moved to Thailand. Coming through here, breathe in, otherwise we're going to get stuck, mate. Oh, jeez. He runs the resort where James and Theresa live and says he's never had to physically restrain any of the people now in his care. What are you going to do today? In fact, they're so calm Brad says they rarely need to be medicated. I've got guests have been on medications, anti-psychotics for, you know, a number of years and they've come here.

and we slowly weaned them off, and now they're they're loving life without that antipsychotic onboard, and it's perfect perfect though. It doesn't come cheap. James pays a little over $55,000 a month for Theresa's care. It's a lot of money, but he says what you get in return is priceless. Unlike in Australia, if you're go to an age care facility, most of them you have to stump up hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the space, to the room, or the villa, whatever it is you decide to take here. You don't have to do that, so you just pay the monthly fee. There's a quality of care that you can't get in Australia or anywhere else. I think in the West when they're considering the move to come over here, I suggest to them, don't sell your home, rent it out, and the income that you'll get from that rent will cover the cost here at the resort. While Thailand is leading the world in dementia care, it's Australia that's well ahead when it comes to

research and for Professor Bryce vissle it's personal you know seeing my own father's Journey Journey with dementia was deeply confronting and very very difficult. I still can't really face it. I mean it's something I still find extremely difficult to deal with but I I really want to see change. We need to find a cure, you know, we need to find a drug and solutions that really profoundly Chang the outcome of this disease. Very determined. The good news is Bryce thinks he's getting close. How long will it be before people will have an option for a treatment? Look, I think we're looking 5 to 7 years for something that can help slow this terrible disease and from there we'll move on to get better and better drugs. Scientists have long thought a buildup of protein in the brain is what causes dementia but his team at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney now says there's more to it. They believe the cause of the disease could be the breakdown of connections between nerve cells in the brain and

rebuilding those connections could be the key to restoring memory. It's a theory they've already got strong evidence for using mice. This mechanism, which regulates these nerve cell connections, it's like a switch on the wall. This so-called switch, this molecule, is turned down in the human brain. We know that from looking at the brains of people who passed away with dementia. And so when we then go to the mouse model and we turn the switch back on, and we get Rescue of the nerve cell connections, we get Rescue of their memory. We're very, very hopeful that this may be the right, at least a way for towards the right answer. Mice are one thing, humans are another. Absolutely, how confident are you that it will work in a human? We're willing to find out that we're wrong. We're willing to challenge ourselves. We're willing for other people to try and show us wrong. That's science. I think it's a very exciting result, and I think people find it exciting and are interested in it. Certainly, by the feedback we're getting, hope is everything in what can.

often feel like a helpless world. [Music] My Mom Lorraine has had dementia for more than 10 years. She can't say much anymore, but music still makes her heart sing. You've got to understand that their brain is not the brain that they had, that they have lost a lot of brain function, but they're still fundamentally the person that you love, and you've got to try and do everything you can to be for there for them. They still must have and be treated with dignity and respect, two values mom always taught me, and like so many families on the same Journey, we sit by her side, clinging to every smile that lets us know 'I love you.' She's still there. 'I love you.' If you could tell Teresa one thing today that she could understand with Clarity, what would it be? The message would be that you know she has, you know, a husband, a family, uh, lots of friends, uh, who, um, wish the best for her, uh, and, uh, if they could, uh, would, would somehow, uh, make this go away. We all wish that, don't

we yeah hello I'm di Clancy. Thanks for watching 60 Minutes Australia. Subscribe to our Channel now for brand new stories and exclusive Clips every week. And don't miss out on our extra minute segments and full episodes of 60 Minutes on .com and the N Now app.

The tropical resort providing world-class dementia care | 60 Minutes Australia

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