If you have an elderly parent living at home, one way to ensure they are safe and well cared for is by hiring in home care services. This way, your parent has the specialized help they need to get through each day. However, there are little, extra steps you can take to make your parent's life living at home even more safe. Here are four ways to do this:
- Install Proper Safety Equipment to Prevent Falls: You should install handrails in the rooms where the most standing takes place, such as the kitchen and bathroom. You should also install a stair seat, as well. If this is not something that is reasonable to do, you can still make the stairs safer, by ensuring there are guardrails on both sides, and the stairs are carpeted to ensure they are not as slippery.
- Regular Doctor Appointments: Most of the time, falls are due to weakening muscles. For this reason, it's important you are going to your parent's regular doctor appointments with them, to understand just how excessive the weakening of the joints, muscles and bones might be. This is going to help you understand the level of care that your parent needs. You might want to increase your in home care to be 24/7, instead of just during certain times of the day.
- Review Medication Side Effects: During the doctor appointments, you should also go over the medications your parent is taking. This is important because if there is excessive falling, you might want to talk about alternatives for medications that have a side effect of dizziness, which is a common cause for falling.
- Pill Organization: Finally, you want to be sure that all medications are well organized. If you are going to have an in home care provider during times when medication needs to be administered, you need to leave a list of what needs to be taken and when, and it should be organized, ideally, in a pill container that separates the number of pills needed by day. You should also be sure that you and the in home health care provider are writing down what medications were taken and when, just in case things get thrown off schedule.
Following through with these four extra steps to protect your parent, so they can live more safely in their own home, is the best way to prolong their life in the comfort of their own home, which also improves quality of life.
