Demented patients can be very very difficult to deal with. During my time working in my folk's nursing home I've seen some sights and taken a fair few smacks. We had one who used to call you over and whisper "bend down, bend down, need to tell you a secret". When you bent down she'd give you a right hook across the side of the head that'd knock you over. No one fell for it more than once. Then we had Mr B who if you tried to wash him would throw the bottle of pee that he'd stored especially for the event at you. Lovely. Social services are a mystery to anyone who works with the elderly. They are a giant, king sized pain in the arse and they really don't seem to see the elderly as people. They see them as 'demented' or 'stroke victim', never as 'Ronnie' or 'Jean' and if they ever pulled their head out of the rulebook for more than 5 minutes they'd see that individual personalities mean that some people don't fit into the neat little boxes that they refuse to deviate from. They are the most frustrating group of people ever.