When you’re getting all wrinkly and toothless, you will need to have someone to take care and accompany you. They may be your now-adult children or a nurse or a caregiver that provides elderly healthcare.
Caregiving is unrelenting, demanding and challenging. It is a gesture to help and support a person who is need of physical, psychological, and developmental assistance. Caring for others involves, an instrumental, informational, and emotional supervision which includes counseling, listening, and companionshipto improve their life.
Caregivers are individuals who actively helps others who are chronically ill, disabled or of old age. But they are more than just nurses who provide elderly home healthcare; they also help in other particular activities such as bathing, dressing, eating, or any chores that they could not do alone. With an increasing population of aged people, caregivers play a vital role in today’s world.
Here are the top 8 Duties of Elderly Home Healthcare worker:
- Care Planning
It can be tricky to know how much time and commitment you will need to provide elderly home healthcare. This is why it is important to create a care plan in order to ensure proper coverage for all tasks and manage health and home responsibilities.
This plan should be created with the input of the family members, the medical team and all those who are providing services. From this, estimated budget and time can be advised to set a proper expectation for care.
- Assessing Medical Needs
Does your client have a prescription medication or needs help in managing pain he or she feels? While it6 is useful to have a physician overseeing a senior’s medical needs, caregivers will still need to take on the role of advocate in order to ensure that hospital appointments are made, medicines are prescribed and taken at the right time, and issues are addressed properly before they can become a life-threatening situation.
Also, providers of elderly home healthcare are also required to look over health insurance paperwork, doctor’s order and billing statement in order to make sure that their client is not being overcharged or treated inconsistently according to their care plan.
As people age, their prescription can grow at an alarming pace. There are patients who might need to take over a dozen different medications at a time. This can become confusing to an individual of an old age which is why caregivers need to oversee the administration, prescription, pick-up order and certain changes in medications.
- Help with Personal Hygiene
For most elderly, personal hygiene and other intimate tasks of their daily lives become impossible for them to handle alone. This is why caregivers are needed to help them with bathing, cleaning up after being sick, using the toilet, washing and combing their hair and other activities for their own personal hygiene.
- Managing Meals and Nutrition
Caregivers do not just make meals. Because older people tend to lose their appetite and only take a few calories every day, caregivers need to make sure that the food they eat must have the best nutrition possible. They also need to consider if the food they will make can interact with their patient’s medication or can cause particular ailments to become worse.
- Helping with Mobility and Transportation
Older people have difficulties moving around because of their weak joints and bones. Whether it is to properly move the patient to a wheelchair or to the toilet, a caregiver needs to have the skills to safely “transfer” their patient from one place to another in order to avoid injuries or accidents.
Also, a good caregiver does not allow their patients to be withdrawn from society and provides some normalcy by driving them to social events and also to their medical appointments. Whether it is to get them a dental cleaning or drive them to the park, a good caregiver will provide not only healthcare but also a healthy quality of life for their patients.
- Housekeeping
Caregivers are not only nurses, they too are housekeepers. They should have basic repair and cleaning skills and should not have any problems with doing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom.
- Companionship
Most elderly who avail senior in-home healthcare services are alone. Meaning they do not have someone to talk to or no one to keep them company. Caregivers not only take care of their patients but they also give them the company they crave for— from chatting over coffee to playing games and watching TV— caregivers make sure that their patient does not feel alone.
Conclusion:
Providing elderly home healthcare is never easy. You just don’t assist in your patient’s medical and healthcare needs, but you also need to do the basics of housekeeping and home management. However, home nursing and the ability to still care for their patients no matter how hard the job is something praiseworthy because of the fact that not anyone can do it.