Senior Home Care: When It’s Time

If you are looking to take care of an elderly parent, but don’t want to send them to a nursing home, but don’t have the time to stay with them at your own home, then senior home care may be the right type of service for you, giving your loved ones the best medical and companion type care, all in the comfort of the home environment.

The benefits are totally logical and practical in this case – it’s all about familiarity, independence, and the convenience of having the people that you love close by and well taken care of, without the worries of them not socially adjust to the more clinical nursing home structures.

Senior home care providers can do things like do physical therapy, ensure nutrition is one of their priorities, allow for caregiver education, and help with consistent requirements like monitoring illness and checking on unstable health conditions. Caregivers also help with using the bathroom, dressing, light housekeeping, shopping, laundry, and specific cooking requirements as per the contract involved.

The best way for you to find these places is either through recommendations from hospitals, searching on the internet for local agencies, or looking in the yellow pages. As you are looking, just be sure that your insurance company covers whatever specific services you need, because you don’t want to get caught up in details later if you aren’t paying attention.

Once you start the home care process, you’ll quick realize just how much you can expect from the caregiver. The aids will constantly be checking thing like blood pressure and temperature, heart rate and breathing, as well as making sure that you are mentally and emotionally okay with your surrounding, and that you medications being taken in the right doses at the right times.

There is also something called a plan of care that you should always be aware of – it’s basically a black and white list of all of the things that need to be looked at daily during the process of care, mostly dealing with any equipment that needs to be present, but also dealing with things like the expectations of the patient for extended care.

The next step after you get all set up and the care has started, is to make it a point to constantly evaluate the basic quality of the care that you are given. Staff should always be polite and positive, and the efficiency and depth of care should be regularly improving over time.

Once you’ve done your research, made sure that finances are in order, explained to your family what’s going on, and decided on a provider, you’ll find that senior home care can be an extremely positive experience as opposed to the discomfort of a hospital or nursing home.

Jessica is healthcare consultant who specializes in home health care in Darien. .