Senior home care is about keeping you living independently in your own home for as long as possible—ideally indefinitely. Acknowledging that daily life would be far easier with some assistance isn't an admission of defeat, nor is it the first step towards living in a retirement home.
What can you realistically expect from senior home care?
What You Need
What you can expect is related to what you need. The types of assistance on offer are adaptive and can increase depending on your changing needs. While you may only need minimal assistance with labor-intensive tasks at first, this might change as the years go by, meaning that your level of required care will also need to change.
Strenuous Chores
Starting with that minimal assistance, you might first need home care to help you with particularly strenuous chores at home, such as yard work (mowing the lawns, weeding) or even cleaning (vacuuming). As you grow older, your mobility may be reduced, and degenerative joint, muscle, and bone conditions can become more prevalent—which can all be part of the aging process. You may need assistance to ensure that these particularly strenuous tasks are properly carried out.
No Single Approach
For some clients, assistance with their more strenuous yard work and housework may be the extent of any assistance that's required. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to senior home care, and as mentioned, the approach must be adaptive to accommodate your changing needs.
Additional Assistance
In the years to come, you might require assistance with more than domestic chores. You could need some help to go grocery shopping, and even with running errands—such as attending medical appointments. You could also come to need help with self-care, such as bathing yourself and getting dressed. Although the relationship between a senior care worker and their clients doesn't resemble a typical relationship between a nurse and a patient, there may be some similarities.
Healthcare
Not all care workers are medical professionals, but if you should require assistance with healthcare, many care agencies can provide a registered nurse for this purpose. This can include assistance with managing your medication, post-surgery care as needed, and general supervision of your medical well-being.
Senior home care exists on a number of levels, ranging from domestic assistance all the way up to personalized health care. Remember that needing home care isn't an admission that you're no longer able to be independent—since retaining this independence is largely the point of home care.
Share16 December 2022
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