Avoiding And Dealing With Falls Whilst Caring For The Elderly

Anyone that has even a tiny amount of experience in caring for the elderly will be able to alert you to the pitfalls and hazards of the job as primary caregiver. One of the first things that any of these individuals will mention to you that relate directly to your role is the constant danger of falls. The elderly, as a collective, have an astonishing number of falls every year.

This can be attributed to a variety of factors but is primarily a result of feeling and being unstable on their feet. Their bodies are not agile enough to avoid falls and repeated episode could cause more harm than good. As elderly bones are more brittle that those of younger generations then they can easily be broken. Dislocated and fractured hips are the bone break of choice for most elderly individuals and can be extremely painful and debilitating. As a result, you need to be aware of the hazard and prevent it before it happens. 

As prevention is better than cure when it comes to elderly falls and resultant hospital trips, it may be wise to put preventative measure in place to head off falls before they occur. Maintaining the safety and security of an elderly individual can be very difficult initially because you do not have eyes in the back of your head. It can take a while to become used to their movements, habits and routines. If you watch them closely enough over a period of time then you will soon be able to anticipate their moves before they make them. This can help to prevent falls because you will be able to spot danger a mile off. However, it is not a solution that can be used in the short term, and you do need to be able to prevent falls occurring as soon as possible after you become their primary caregiver.

The first thing that you should do to prevent trips and falls actually has nothing to do with the elderly individual in general terms. Instead, you should focus on their immediate environment. You should remove all possible tripping hazards in their home. Everything from rugs and loose carpeting to small objects that are used to decorate a room should be removed. They can all be hazardous in the right situation, or wrong situation as the case may be! You should also look into effective methods of controlling falls.

If the elderly individual that you look after does experience a fall in the home, then it is of the utmost importance that you know exactly how to deal with the situation. Firstly, you need to remove all hazards from around the individual to allow you to get closer and assess the damage. You must then administer first aid if it is appropriate to do so. Try not to move the individual until you are certain that there is no damage to joints and limbs. If there is or you think that he or she may have sustained a head injury, then you should immediately call an ambulance. Just keep your relative warm and as comfortable as possible until the paramedics arrive.

Falls represent very real hazards in the home and you must always be prepared to deal with them. You will inevitably have to deal with them at some stage, no matter how well prepared you are, but removing the means will reduce the amount of falls and hopefully lower the severity of the injuries.

The Best Activities To Stimulate Mentally Ill Seniors

As a caregiver, it is difficult to summon up the energy to do what is in the best interests of the senior that you are looking after at times. It can be extremely exhausting because you have undergone enough mental stimulation to last a lifetime in just a few weeks. However, if you can keep elderly people with mental illnesses occupied, then you are half way to ward winning the battle.

Mental stimulation of the mentally ill seniors in you care can work wonders fro your mental health as well as theirs. Playing with them, which is essentially what it is, will provide you with a welcome break from your usual caring routine. Setting aside a specific time frame every few days will also ensure that you are doing something fun with them. For the senior, it often proves to be the highlight of their week because they finally recognise something and respond to it. It breaks the monotony for them and can actively be used to calm them. They also see a light every now and then in the dark tunnel of the mind, and they can often remember it and look forward to it.

It is important to mentally stimulate elderly people in your care to keep their minds as sharp and active as possible. Seniors with Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease and dementia, amongst other ailments, must exercise their minds as often as possible and finding the right ways to achieve this could take forever, unless you have a little bit of help and advice. Medical research has found that some forms of stimulation are better than others because of the way in which the mind responds to certain stimuli.

Bright colours have been found to work best by the various studies that have been carried out. Playing with rag dolls, and brightly coloured balls have worked wonders in keeping their mind active. In fact, if you ask them to do something whilst they are concentrating on the colours will more often than not result in them doing it. This exercise is, of course, purely for fun because it has no direct meaning attached to it. However, there are certain activities that do have meaning and can also be used to exercise them physically as well as mentally. Examples of games that are brightly coloured and serve a purpose are puzzles. You can find large piece jigsaw puzzles of clown and balloons. Not only do the colours draw their eye, but you can also encourage the individual senior to try and place the piece, with a little help of course!

Outdoor activities that involve animals are also perfect activities for mentally disabled seniors. For example, walking a dog will afford them responsibility and give some meaning to what they are doing, as well as enhancing their perception of themselves effectively. The responsibility of looking after another living creature can brighten up even their darkest days. Dogs are perfect for such activities because they are loving and affectionate and provide a warm and loving response to any fuss and attention they receive. Obviously, any such activities must be carried out under close supervision to ensure that the safety of all is maintained.

It is important that you, as a carer, do all you can to make sure that seniors in you care remain in the best of health as far as is under your control. Activities like the one above can be fun for bother the caregiver and receiver. They have integral benefits and tend to bring the best out in seniors with mental diseases and illnesses.

Caring For The Elderly: Working With Their Money

If you are the primary caregiver for an elderly relative, you will soon come to realise that your responsibility is not limited to their personal health. You will discover within a matter of weeks that you will ultimately be expected to take care of their lives in general, which includes everything from regular outings to their finances. The latter will usually be one of your more pressing concerns, whether you feel comfortable with the idea of being responsible for another's money or not. In an ideal world there will be very little to this and you will not need to spend much time on it because of wealth that your senior relative has accumulated over the years. However, in reality it rarely plays out that way. You will effectively have to budget for them over the course of the time that they are in your charge.

Before you can even begin to start budgeting for your elderly relative, you need to work out exactly where they stand with their finances. You can do this by getting organized and drawing up an effective set of accounts that you can work with on a weekly basis. These accounts do not have to be professional by any means, as long as you can fully understand and follow them. You should look at all of the household bills and payments towards outstanding debts as well as any other outgoings over the twelve months before you actually too over that particular set of finances.

Taking income from pensions and other sources into account, you should take the previous years' outgoings as a good indicator of what you can expect to pay out in the coming year as well as the amount of expendable wealth that you will be left with for general provisions. Income is a vital key to your ability to budget. You must research the source of this money to ensure that bank credits will remain at the same amount. If you fail to do this, you could possibly find yourself in a financial mess on behalf of your elderly relative and that would certainly throw a spanner in the works as far as your budgeting is concerned. However, if you do complete the necessary research then you can then begin budgeting from there.

It may also be worth setting aside some money every month to put into a rainy day savings fund on behalf of the elderly relative under your care. None of us know what the future holds for us, and in some ways we should be thankful for it. However, if your relative does need specialist care or treatment and has to pay for it, then you may find yourself in an impossible situation. Seniors often have to sell their homes in order to get the medical care that they need, whether that is in the form of home help or medication, so it is best to avoid this by preparing them financially for every eventuality.

Budgeting on behalf of an elderly relative under your care may indeed prove to be a pain, especially if you are striving to fulfil all of their other needs at the same time. However, it is very necessary to give them a helping hand in this department because they may otherwise find that they have no heating, water or even roof over their head. Utility companies are notoriously unsympathetic if bills do not get paid and thus it may prove extremely prudent to begin budgeting from the very first day that you accept the role as primary caregiver. It will certainly pay dividends in the long term.

The Importance Of Medication When Caring For Seniors

It is inevitable that, when you are caring for seniors, you will have copious amounts of pills and solutions to go through on a daily basis. When a senior gets to the point that he or she can no longer take care of their own affairs, it is pretty obvious that her or she can also no longer take care of their own body too. As a result of either physical or mental ailments, they are likely to have several prescriptions on the go for the various maladies, and all at the same time. Although it may be a mammoth task to sort through all of them, it is extremely important that you do so. The elderly person in your care has been prescribed the medication for a reason and, if it were left up to them, the various pills and potions would not get taken at all.

There are steps you can to take to help yourself where the elderly person in your charge is concerned. Firstly, you must sort through all of the medications and make sure that you are fully informed about all of the dosages as well as checking that the prescriptions are up to date. There is only one way that you check your findings against the relevant prescriptions and that is a brief consultation with the doctor who has been dealing with the person you are looking after. Of course, they are not allowed to tell you about another individual's medical history unless they receive the express consent of the individual in question. You should therefore take the senior in question with you. Not only can the doctor then provide you with all of the information that you need, but he or she can also place your name on the necessary medical records to denote your status as primary carer.

As soon as you are armed with all of the information you need, you can start to get organized. The most important thing to do is establish a routine so that no medications are ignored or forgotten about. The routine will also help the senior in your care to settle under your authority. He or she will be reassured by the fact that there are specific times for certain medications and will feel all the better for it. It will also give you peace of mind so that do not worry about the finer details that you may forget from day today. The routine will effectively take care of all of that.

You can use all kinds of tools to ensure that medications are taken in the correct doses at the correct times. It may be an idea to compile a checklist for you to fill in every day when medication has been taken. This will also enable you to keep track of the supply of each medication that you have. You will then know when it is time to refill the prescription. Daily doses boxes are also a fantastic idea in this sort of situation. The come in little grids that are sealed to prevent the senior from getting to them and taking them at the wrong times or in the wrong doses. You can fill them at the start of every month, thus making your daily task of regulating the medication that little bit easier. It will also keep them all in the same place and save you valuable time that can be better spent doing other things.

By creating a highly organized system, you can avoid any mistakes and enhance the life of the elderly person in your care no end.

Routine: The Golden Rule Of Caring For The Elderly

If you are caring for the elderly in any capacity, whether it is as a care assistant in a retirement home or as a primary caregiver in the home of an elderly relative, it can be difficult to know where to start and what to do. If you are new to caring then it can be a very daunting experience because you are literally thrown in at the deep end. You learn or run; it is as simple as that. There are no courses or hard and fast rules that can tell you how to react in certain situations. Every caregiver has to find his or her own footing when caring for the elderly, and then translate that into a level on which you feel comfortable in order to be effective. However, there is one golden rule that you should follow and adopt as your private philosophy - always establish a routine and never underestimate its power!

Routines are essential when you are trying to establish a bond with the elderly person under your care. They can make that individual senior extremely happy and afford them an immense sense of comfort, as well as making your life so much easier! Before you even begin to think about establishing a daily routine though, you need to find out as much about the individual as you can. This shouldn't be a problem if you are related in some way, but it applies just as much as it does to caring for a complete stranger. You can't even begin to think about a routine if you do not know the person because they may hate certain aspects of the care that you impose on them. An effective routine is always based on mutual interests and compromise.

By getting t know the individual that you are caring for, you can build a solid foundation of trust and mutual respect. Trying to get into a routine before you have this will doom it to failure. Regardless of how logical and effective your routine promises to be, you cannot have a hope of it succeeding if the person that you are trying to help repeatedly bucks and sabotages it. Build the trust and then the routine.

A good routine will have a stabilizing effect on the elderly person that you are caring for, which will make your long term working relationship with them so much happier and less stressful. It will help you to remember what to do and when, and it will help the senior to remember what he or she has to do as well. Repeatedly doing the same thing over and over can give an immense sense of comfort to the senior because there is nothing unexpected thrown in to upset them.

The frustration of not knowing what is happening in your own world can be extremely upsetting, but a routine can help to avoid it. The familiar can give seniors a sense that they have some sort of control over their lives and can be used effectively to this end by caregivers. It can take months to build up an effective routine, but once it is in place then you will be loathed to deviate from it.

Once you have tried out the golden rule for yourself, you will see just how effective a tool it can be. It gives you a measure of control without taking away the elderly person's independence. It can cut out unnecessary stress. Although you do have to persevere to establish it and may face an initial rebellion, it will ultimately be worth the effort and both the caregiver and receiver will fully appreciate it.

The Basics Of Elderly Personal Hygiene

Personal hygiene is an essential part of every individual's daily routine. You get up, shower, clean your teeth, deodorise and repeat the same steps in the evening to make sure that you stay fresh all day long. Being personally hygienic can make you feel great. However, what if you were to be unable to fully look after yourself and nobody would actually carry out that routine for you? You would go into every day feeling dirty and that would only serve to induce depression and frustration. It is therefore important to establish a hygiene routine whilst caring for the elderly so that you don't miss anything out.

If you are responsible for washing the elderly person that you are caring for then you should pay attention to the routine that you are establishing and talk them through it the first few times so they know what to expect. This will not only build up trust, but may go some way to helping them relax. Many seniors are somewhat reluctant to let anyone administer their personal care, and understandably so. If you rely on someone to do everything for you then you are likely to feel as if you have lost all of the self-respect you had for yourself, as well as your dignity. It is exactly the same for seniors, regardless of illness and mental state, unless they are completely unaware of what is going on. Some seniors may even react angrily but again this is completely understandable. It may be unpleasant to experience verbal abuse, which you may just get in this situation, but if you put yourself in their shoes you will understand exactly where they are coming from.

If the senior in your care can be encouraged to maintain their personal hygiene and can be trusted then you should always allow them to administer their own personal care. Not only does this promote their independence, but is also gives them a sense of purpose. Even if they can only do one little thing for themselves then it is better than nothing!

The routine that you establish regarding a senior's personal hygiene should include all the basic elements that we include in our own daily routine. Showering, washing all of the nooks and crannies, deodorising and brushing teeth should always be the integral elements. This should take place every day. However, the routine can incorporate other things. For example, if the female senior in you care like to put on makeup to feel feminine then you should encourage it as far as possible in order to maintain her identity.

It is also worth noting that maintaining good personal hygiene for the elderly in your care will not only promote mental well-being, it will also promote physical health. If you are washing someone, then you are likely to note any lumps, bumps and bruises as well as any bodily changes that may spell trouble in the future. By noticing and noting changes in a care plan, you are creating a medical record that may lead to early diagnosis of illnesses. Also, if there is more than one carer performing the same role for the elderly people in your care, it may also alert them to any physical changes.

Personal hygiene is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of caring for the elderly. It can be a sensitive area but, if handled in the right way, it can also form a bond between you. As long as effective hygiene is maintained, the rest will fall into place as far as their appearance is concerned.

A Quick Guide To Hospice Care

It is a common belief in society that life goes full circle. You are born, live your life and then die, to put it quite morbidly, but in between you go full circle. Seniors often regress back to their childhood as they go further and further into old age because they may need the same amount of care in their final days as they did in their very first ones. As a result, the care you can give them, as caregivers and relatives, is no longer adequate. As they head into their final days, it may well be time to make a choice as to where they will spend them. A hospice is usually a popular option because of the level of specialist care they offer. This is your quick guide to hospices with a brief overview of the information that you may need to make up your mind.

A hospice is a specialist unit that is usually separated from a hospital. It has a much more friendly atmosphere, despite being a specialist care unit for those who are coming to their last days on this Earth. The staff are all highly trained, but are also employed for what they can bring to the hospice in terms of attitude and efficiency, The staff are a colourful combinations of nurses, doctors, counsellors, assistants and religious community leaders. In effect, they are there to provide for all of your needs in order to make sure that your relative is as comfortable as possible.

Regardless of whether you know how a hospice works or not, it is still an impossible decision to make when it comes to choosing. This is mainly because, despite caring for an elderly relative for a period of time, you still will not want to admit exactly what is going to happen, inevitably sooner rather than later. However, the set up of a hospice is designed to allay these fears and unwillingness to relinquish the controls to a certain extent. It is designed to fully support the family as well as the individual seniors who will go to stay there.

A fear that many carers and family members have is that their relative will be going into a hospice before he or she is ready to do so. However, if you are even considering it then it is most definitely the right time. After all, as the main caregiver, you will have witness the changes that have taken place within your relative over a period of time. It can be so heartbreaking to watch him or her turn into a completely different person as a result of old age and illness. By the time that they have reached the hospice stage, they are no longer the person that you once knew and loved, and the hospice can help you to let go and simply start to grieve.

Hospice care is unobtrusive and, to a certain extent, you could still continue to administer the care that you had been so used to. Staff are there to ensure that your elderly relative is as comfortable as possible, but are also there to help you and will completely understand your role up until that point. You just have to leave your elderly relative in the best hands possible. You did the best you could and there comes a time when you have to enjoy what little time you have left with the centre of your life up until that point.

Taking Care Of Yourself As Well As The Elderly

Caring for an elderly member of your family is a huge responsibility that very few people actually take on today. It is to be commended for so many reasons, especially when you consider just how much caregivers do give up to dedicate themselves to their family. When you do accept the task of looking after an individual family member who is no longer capable of taking care of his or herself, the key element to remember is that you have no idea just how long that commitment will be. It could be months, it could be years, but either way you will be mentally exhausted and close to burnout within a few weeks of beginning your role as primary caregiver.

The role of primary caregiver is an all consuming one that will quickly take over your life. There is no way to avoid this and, despite all of your best efforts, it is unavoidable. The problem is that you will find it difficult to actually switch off and thus will find it essential to rest every now and again, whether that means getting away for a few days or taking a break within your own home. Either way, just like an ordinary full time job, you will need to recharge your batteries because they will get very low very quickly.

Before you can think about when you will take a break, you must make arrangements to have your elderly relative taken care of in your absence. There are a few options when it comes to this element of your own personal care. The first is respite placements in a retirement home. Many homes actually reserve rooms solely for respite cases in order for families to have a rest from the constant demands that are placed upon them. You can view the home in question before booking a place, and all of the homes with this specific facility will be listed at the local authority offices in your area as well as being available via search facilities on the Internet.

Another option is getting home help or home care in for the time that you are away or taking a break. Home help will visit up to three times a day for approximately an hour to wash, dress and feed your relative. However, they will not remain with them round the clock. Another version of this is home care, which means that your relative will have someone there for a longer period of time but again not at his or her beck and call around the clock. If you spend a lot of time with your relative then this not be the best option to give you peace of mind, and of course it all depends on how able your relative is to begin with.

The final option is actually getting another member of your family to help out for a few days, just to relieve you of your duties for the time being. It would possibly be easier to hand over the reigns because there would be less chance that they could not be brought up to speed with developments and routines. You could also reach them at a moment's notice and have peace of mind that your elderly relative was being cared for. This is all dependent on getting a volunteer at all, let alone one that you could trust with that task.