'Ross Kemp: Living With Dementia': Barbara Windsor May Need To Be Placed In A Care Home

Dame Barbara Windsor may need to be placed into a care home as her dementia deteriorates, her husband has said.

Speaking to Ross Kemp for his new ITV documentary, Scott Mitchell explained he'd been given a "stark warning" from his 82-year-old wife's specialist.

"He's basically telling me I need to prepare myself," Scott tells Ross in tonight's episode of Living With Dementia. "That at some point it may not be sustainable to give her the kind of care she needs at the house."

You can watch the emotional interview here:

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"It's horrible, it's the thing I've always feared, Ross. I've been, I mean I've had some fairly dark moment since he said that. Because there is a part of me that knows that that is the truth and that is the most likely to happen.

"But there is another part of me, Ross, which can't imagine letting her go. I can't imagine leaving that lady, when she talks to me the way she does. And putting her somewhere and her thinking why has she done this."

Scott adds: "Now that we're where we are, which is six years after diagnosis, it's a very common thing for me to sit with Barbara at night, firstly her never having a clue that we are actually in our own home, she looks around suddenly and says, 'Why are there pictures of me in this house?'

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"Let's not kid ourselves, and I'd be doing everyone a disservice if I didn't talk about the realities of where this can end up, which can be people being totally bed-ridden, forgetting how to speak, forgetting how to swallow. It will take away everything, this will strip you of everything that you know as functioning normally."

Dame Barbara, who played landlady Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders opposite Ross, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2014.

In last week's episode, her husband Scott described how Alzheimer's - the most common form of dementia - had turned their lives upside down since Barbara's diagnosis, saying: "It's not the Barbara that I knew. It's not my wife Barbara any more.

"I'm Barbara's carer, I'm still her friend, you know, I still love the bones off the woman but it's not the Barbara I know, and you [do], that I live with."

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Part of Ross's Living With series, the two-part documentary explores the impact of living with dementia, which is currently recognised as Britain's biggest killer.

Speaking about his latest venture, Ross said: "I've always believed that to understand a problem, you need to get as close to it as you possibly can.

"So I'm back meeting people who are living with some of the biggest issues facing Britain today. With almost 1 million people living with dementia, this is the first of two programmes where I'm meeting people battling with the disease."

Ross will follow up the two-part series with docs on people living on opioids and the UK's homelessness crisis.

Ross Kemp: Living With Dementia returns Thursday 18th June at 7.30pm on ITV

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Unity Blott

Unity Blott is the Editor at Tyla. You can contact her on [email protected].

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