When Is Home-Care for Seniors Not Enough?
Aging carries its own unique and special wisdom. It also carries a host of unanticipated challenges and needs. If someone in your life is progressing in their senior years, you may be experiencing some of these challenges first hand, and seeking out practical solutions.
When a beloved senior in your life starts to need moderate help around the house, a home care aide can be a suitable option. It allows your loved one to remain in their home and maintain all of the comfortable aspects of their life. Furthermore, in the beginning, your loved one may only need periodic help, attention and care.
At some point however, as their daily needs progress, home-care may no longer be an adequate option. The choice to move your loved one out of their home is certainly a tough one. However, ensuring that all of their daily needs are met is crucial for their safety and happiness.
How can you possibly know when it is time to make such a drastic move? Below are some signals that home care may no longer be enough for your loved one.
Home Care Has Become Too Expensive
If you only need a home care aide to check in on your loved one a couple of times per week, or even for a couple of hours per day, home care can be an efficient and cost-effective option. However, if your loved one begins to need more substantial daily care, the cost-per-hour may become too great.
When it gets to the point that a full-time or live-in aide is required to meet your loved one’s needs, you may want to start considering other options. At this point, a senior living facility may become the more effective option for you.
It is Difficult to Find an Aide
Finding a home care aide in your area that suits your required schedule is difficult in and of itself. This effort becomes even more complicated when you consider the matter of personality. If a home care aide is going to be spending time home alone with your loved one, you need to make sure that they get along. In many instances, this is easier said than done. It may take moving through a slew of home care aides before you can find the right fit.
When that aide needs to move on for reasons you can’t control, you are back at the drawing board again. If looking for a suitable home care aide has become tiresome, it might be time to think about other options.
There Are Gaps in Care
When you rely on one person to handle the home care needs of your loved one, there may be times when they simply can’t make it. Illnesses, emergencies, family problems, and other unexpected circumstances can keep even the most reliable aide out of work from time to time. Unless you have local family members available to pick up the slack, this can result in gaps in your loved one’s care.
If your loved one relies heavily on daily home assistance, and particularly if gaps in care have become an issue, you might want to look into alternative care ideas.
Your Loved One Feels Isolated
When a senior is more or less restricted to the homefront, with only the aide dropping by every day or two and not a significant number of other visitors, that person runs the risk of becoming lonely and isolated. This can lead to sadness and depression, and may even exacerbate some health conditions.
Although moving to a senior living facility is a major adjustment, it can open up numerous new socialization opportunities. In a senior living facility, your loved one will always have someone to talk to. Additionally, in assisted living facilities, seniors often help one another. Senior care from seniors helping seniors can have a positive impact.
If the senior in your life needs only a little assistance at home, hiring a home care aide can help to get those needs met. However, as time goes on, it is important to pay attention to how those needs change, and to evaluate whether or not they are getting the attention and support they need. If the cost of a home care aide becomes too much, you are having trouble finding the right home care aide, there have been gaps in your loved one’s care, or if they begin to feel isolated, consider whether or not a senior living facility may be the right fit for the senior you love.