So often aging adults avoid the idea of bringing in extra help, and the reason usually boils down to not realizing just how helpful this type of care can be. These benefits of engaging with in-home care can be life-changing for your senior.
Help with Household Tasks
Household tasks can be a major source of concern for your elderly family member. Keeping up with tasks like cleaning and laundry ensures that your senior’s environment is both safe and clean for her. That’s vital, and it may not be easy for her to tackle those chores on her own. Having help from home care providers can make the difference between moving elsewhere for more help and aging in place.
Assistance with ADLs and Personal Home Care
Activities of daily living, or ADLs, are ones that your senior might not think about too much until they become seriously challenging for her to handle on her own. At that point, she may start to realize just how important those tasks are. These are things like getting out of bed safely, grooming, and getting dressed. In-home care can ensure that your senior is safely able to have her daily needs met.
Offering Self-care Reminders
Whether she’s having trouble remembering to do specific self-care tasks, like taking medication or drinking water, or simply wants to avoid them, reminders can help. Home care providers can offer the reminders your elderly family member needs in order to properly manage self-care tasks that she’s still personally in charge of on a daily basis. Knowing what to do when takes a lot of pressure off your senior.
Helping with Transportation
If driving has become too difficult or unsafe for your elderly family member, in-home care providers can help. Just because she’s not able to drive herself doesn’t mean that your senior doesn’t want or need to go places. When you know that she has safe means of transportation on a regular basis, that’s something that can help you to relax.
Ensuring Your Senior Eats
Getting the nutrition that she needs is the biggest way to help your senior to remain strong and as independent as she wants to be. There can be a wide range of reasons your senior isn’t getting nutrition regularly, from forgetting to eat all the way to not wanting to spend time and energy cooking food. In-home care can handle all sorts of issues related to eating for your senior.
Offering Companionship
Throughout all of the different tasks that in-home care providers help your senior to manage, they can also offer her companionship to make her day that much more enjoyable and social. So many aging adults withdraw and self-isolate, either because they don’t feel well due to health issues or because of other concerns. Having someone there with her on a regular basis can give your senior the social engagement she’s been missing.
It’s a delicate balancing act to meet your senior’s needs without taking over or bossing her around, and caregivers are able to do that for your family.