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| Four Seasons Hemet Herald | SEPTEMBER 2019 | 33 Question: What is the FAST Scale? The FAST Scale stands for the Functional Assessment Staging scale. This scale designed to help doctors, patients, and their loved ones talk about and understand the progress of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. 1. No difficulty either subjectively or objectively. 2. Complaints of forgetting location of objects. Subjective work difficulties. 3. Decreased job functioning evident to co-workers. Difficulty in traveling to new locations. Decreased organization capacity. 4. Decreased ability to perform complex task, (e.g., planning dinner for guests, handling personal finances such as forgetting to pay bills etc.). 5. Requires assistance in choosing proper clothing to wear for the day, season or occasion, (e.g., patient may wear the same clothing repeatedly, unless supervised). 6. Occasionally or more frequently over the past weeks for the following: A.) Improperly putting on clothes without assistance or cueing. B.) Unable to bathe properly (not able to choose proper water temperature). C.) Inability to handle mechanics of toileting (e.g., forget to flush toilet, does not wipe properly or properly dispose of toilet tissue). D.) Urinary incontinence E. ) Fecal incontinence 7. Other A.) Ability to speak limited to approximately less than six intelligible words in the course of an average day. B.) Speech ability is limited to the use of a single intelligible word in an average day. C.) Ambulatory ability is lost (cannot walk without assistance). D.) Cannot sit up without assistance. E.) Loss of ability to smile. F.) Loss of ability to hold up head independently. Alzheimer's Disease always progresses through the FAST scale in order, although there are other dementia conditions that do not, and where patients might skip stages. The FAST scale is a criteria for hospice care. Normally, patients in hospice care for Alzheimer's are in stage seven, but this isn't always the case. Often, those with Alzheimer's disease can also be suffering from other conditions, such as coronary heart disease so being somewhere in the six category could make the patient appropriate for hospice. For any questions or a needs assessment please contact Jennifer Trebler- Partridge at (951) 663-1060. ASK A QUESTION