What is widely viewed as the best and most viable delivery of health care in America? Infirmed and elderly individuals have been found to prefer home care by 90 percent over comparable institutional care.
What are some of the reasons for in-home elderly care? This article counts the many ways!
1. Home care is delivered, as you would expect, at home. Dorothy said it best: “There’s no place like home.” Certainly, this is a statement that most people would wholeheartedly agree with. There is nothing like the comfort and familiarity of being cared for in the comfort and familiarity of one’s own home.
2. In-home care helps keep families together. Compare this to taking an elderly person away from their loved ones. At no time is family more important than during times of illness.
3. Elderly care helps seniors maintain their independence. Home care allows seniors to continue to live in the place they function best – their home.
4. Home care prevents or puts off institutional life. Living in a long-term care facility is unfamiliar and can often be intimidating. Most people prefer postponing the inevitable as long as possible.
5. Home care helps promote healing. Medical evidence shows that people recover more quickly at home.
6. In-home elderly care is safer. There is no secret that people pick up infections and other complications when they live amid a chronically ill population (such as in a hospital or long-term care facility). This is obviously not the case when cared for at home.
7. Home care means personalized care. Care becomes a one-to-one proposition in the home. You get this nowhere else.
8. Home care often gets the entire family involved in providing care. Immediate and extended family members often take an active role at different times of the day.
9. Home care reduces the stress that often accompanies illness. Illness increases anxiety and stress, but it’s not nearly as great when care is practiced in the home.
10. Home care is the most effective form of health care delivered in terms of customer satisfaction. It all comes back to the fact that people prefer to be at home.
11. Home care is delivered by a special group of people. People don’t work in the home care industry for the money. They do it for the emotional satisfaction of helping others and for making a difference in the life of another.
12. Home care extends life. Studies by nursing schools and government agencies have found that home care extends life. Visits by home care personnel often provide spiritual as well as medical support.
13. Home care improves one’s quality of life. For most people, the quality of their life is far better at home than anywhere else.
14. Home care is less expensive than other forms of care. The cost of home care is always less expensive than hospitalization and almost always more affordable than nursing home or assisted living care.
15. Technology will make home care even more desirable in the future. Medical and technological advances will soon make it possible to diagnose, monitor and treat illness at a distance. This will help make home care even more of a preferred option.
Home care, unlike in the past, is no longer a well-kept secret. There are, after all, at least 15 good reasons for considering home care for a parent, spouse or other loved one. Please call us today so we can assist you with your home care needs.
Tender Hearts at Home Senior Care of Cincinnati, Ohio provides the best non-medical home care services with compassionate caregivers. They provide home health care, elder care, live in care, personal care, companion care, respite care, errands, transportation, home helper and senior helper services and all many other types of non-medical senior care. A family owned and operated company in Cincinnati, Ohio serving Hamilton, Butler, Warren, and Clermont counties. Please call us when your loved one needs help at 513-234-0805
Tags: cincinnati, Home Care, Home Health Care, mason, ohio, west chester, why use in home elderly care
Taking care of an elderly loved one, whether due to dementia or illness, can be exhausting and stressful. Often due to the lack of outside help, a devotion to the person needing care, or the tunnel vision that can accompany exhaustion, caretakers don’t take care of themselves.
But they must. Failure to do so can lead to burnout, injury or illness. If you are the caregiver, any of these results will harm your ability to care for your loved one.
Here are some ways to take care of yourself and make sure you can take care of your loved one. The list is adapted from New York Times columnist Jane Brody’s excellent Nov. 17, 2008, column, “Caring for Family, Caring for Yourself.”
Take a break every day. Make sure you have some down time to relax, whether it’s watching television, reading the newspaper, or calling a friend. Make sure you do at least one thing for yourself every day.
Take a break every week. If possible, get out of the house at least once a week to do something you want to do — go to the movies, have dinner with friends, whatever works for you. If you cannot get someone to cover for you, have friends over to your house.
Get respite. Take a break of at least a week at least once a year. You can hire help in the house or arrange for a respite stay at an assisted living facility or nursing home.
Get regular exercise. It’s necessary for your health and to moderate any stress you may be feeling. If you can’t get out of the house to exercise, buy or rent a stationary bicycle or other exercise equipment.
Eat well. Make sure you stay healthy and have sufficient energy to do what you need to for your loved one.
Get enough sleep. Lack of sleep will sap your patience and reserves, making it more difficult for you to provide the care you would like to give your loved one.
Join a support group. While you may or may not be in this alone, you’re not the only one in this situation. Others are going through similar experiences. Here are sources for finding support groups: the National Family Caregivers Association (www.nfcacares.org) and its Community Action Network (www.thefamilycaregiver.org), and the Family Caregiver Alliance and its online support group (www.caregiver.org).
Hire a geriatric care manager. An experienced geriatric care manager can help you determine whether your loved one is receiving the most appropriate care and what resources in the community are available to assist you. For more on geriatric care managers, click here.
Consult with an elder law attorney. In order to access many of the programs recommended by the geriatric care manager, your loved one will have to qualify financially. An elder law attorney can help you qualify for these benefits. In addition, make sure you don’t get hit with a double financial whammy of losing years of earnings while you’re caring for your family member and losing his or her assets due to squabbles with other family members or Medicaid estate recovery. Also, you may be entitled to some pay by the state for the care you are providing. To locate a qualified elder law attorney near you, click here.
Lotsa Helping Hands. Check out www.lotsahelpinghands.com as a resource for getting volunteer help in your community and coordinating the help your family and friends already provide.
In short, think of the care you are providing as a marathon, not a sprint. You need to pace yourself and conserve your energy for the long-term. Too much stress and exhaustion won’t help your loved one.
Tender Hearts at Home Senior Care of Cincinnati, Ohio provides the best non-medical home care services with compassionate caregivers. They provide home health care, elder care, live in care, personal care, companion care, respite care, errands, transportation, home helper and senior helper services and all many other types of non-medical senior care. A family owned and operated company in Cincinnati, Ohio and Mason, Ohio serving Hamilton, Butler, Warren, and Clermont counties. Family Helping Families. Please call us when your loved one needs help at 513-234-0805
The list is adapted from New York Times columnist Jane Brody’s excellent Nov. 17, 2008, column, “Caring for Family, Caring for Yourself.” and published from Elder Law Answers website
Tags: Home Care, Home Care In Cincinnati, Home Health Care, Senior Care in Cincinnati
Over the years, Tender Hearts at Home has become known in the Cincinnati area for providing high quality one-on-one caregiving services at home….where ever home may be.
We offer a per day rate for Live-In Care which includes meals. This is a great solution for a family member or resident that should not be left alone and sleeps well through the night.
Live In Care is typically staffed by 2-3 caregivers over the week and the caregivers really get to know and understand their client’s needs.
Tender Hearts at Home is the Cincinnati area’s Live-In Care Specialists.
One of our Caregivers sent this Virginia Nursing Blog to me and in it I found a link to what looks like an interesting Book “Please get to Know Me” Have any of you read this Book?
http://www.nursevirginiablog.com/2010/02/healthcare-workers-get-to-know-their-confused-elderly-patients-from-their-obituaries/
Mabel died today. Minutes later, a nurse hurried down the hall carrying two old books. She stopped and excitedly showed me what the staff found when they cleaned Mabel’s room. She held up books on physics. “Mabel wrote them! Can you believe that? I never knew she wrote anything.”
We had cared for Mabel for six years, but none of us staff knew she had written any books. When she came to us, Mabel was already afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. We later learned that Mabel had been a prominent physicist.
As I listened to the nurse, I thought, Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if Mabel could have enjoyed our expressions of respect, awe, and admiration? Now it was too late.
That true story isn’t an isolated instance. Too often the nursing home staff learn about residents from reading the obituaries. The individual life stories never make it to the direct care staff, even if it had been reported to social workers on admission. The story had been diluted to minimum facts on a fill-in sheet at the back of the chart under the Social Service tab.
