Bringing Home People With Memory Loss

An elderly man who suffered from memory loss set off from his Ventura County home in his car to visit relatives in Los Angeles, got lost and resurfaced some time later--in Las Vegas.

A disoriented Oxnard woman in her late 60s wandered away from her home at night and was picked up by police. Officers took her paranoid delusions seriously and interrogated worried family members when they arrived to retrieve her.

An elderly man afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease hopped a fence at a Ventura nursing home and wandered off.

The last case occurred three years ago. “He’s never been found,� said Jean Ruecker, a member of the Alzheimer’s Assn. of Ventura County Board of Directors. “We believe he’s dead.�

Stories like these are behind Safe Return, a community-based registration system designed to help identify, find and return memory-impaired people.

There are two Safe Return registration sites in Thousand Oaks and others in Simi Valley, Camarillo and Oxnard. A presentation Thursday at Ventura’s Community Memorial Hospital inaugurated the sixth local registration site.

For a one-time enrollment fee of $25, people in the program receive identification tags and are registered in a national database that may be accessed by more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies throughout North America.

“These people are not able to verbalize what their needs are,� said Toni Kamm, president of the county Alzheimer’s association. “They don’t know who they are. They don’t know where they live.�

As the population ages, the need for such a program grows, said officials from the association and from Conejo Valley Senior Concerns, which is helping establish the program throughout the county.

The Alzheimer’s association estimates that there are more than 15,000 people who suffer from memory loss in Ventura County.

There are about 20 causes of memory loss, ranging from physical ailments such as strokes to mental illnesses such as depression. And an estimated four out of five people who suffer from some form of memory loss live in the community rather than in the more protected environment of nursing homes, Kamm said.

The Safe Return program, which claims a 98% recovery rate for participants, is a safety net not only for those who suffer from memory loss but for their families as well, said Thousand Oaks resident Sue Lindemann, whose husband suffers from Alzheimer’s.

“I cannot begin to tell you how much stress that alleviated,� she said. “They can get away just like a child in the blink of an eye.�

For more information about the program, call 652-5095, 497-0159 or 485-5597. In addition, Conejo Valley Senior Concerns sponsors a free 20-minute program that has taught hundreds of people, including taxi drivers and Thousand Oaks public works employees, how to recognize memory-impaired people. Call 497-0189 for more information.