Just over a year ago, my father was in hospital. My mother felt that she was unable to care for him when he was due to come home. This meant that the only option for my father was to go into a care home.

My mother had not thought this through and had not realised that this meant she would be on her own for most of the time. As I was working full time, I could only visit in the evenings and was not able to spend all day with her on my days off.

This was a complete shock to my mother's system and seemed to accelerate her dementia symptoms.

To try to alleviate my mother's stress we started to look for people to visit to break up her day. We arranged for a local cleaner to attend at least once a week. Then we managed to arrange carers from the local authority to attend 3 times per day to ensure mum had support for getting up, midday and for going to bed.

Unfortunately this was not really what my mother wanted. My mother wanted someone to sit and chat with her, to eat meals with her, to look at photographs with her. In reality my mother wanted a friend, someone to spend time with her.

After a few discussions, I looked around to see what services were available and was shocked to find there was no one offering anything like this in our area.

Unfortunately my mother got herself so stressed about being on her own and fixated about being with people that she has now also gone into care. This of course meant that the family home had to be sold.

Having now dealt with the paperwork involved in all of this, I decided that there must be more local seniors looking for a friend. Someone to help them with the small details that can cause them to worry unnecessarily.

Thus Senior Companions Scotland came into being. A service to help our clients remain comfortable in their own home.