Senior Helpers’ Wellness Watch brings your family the peace of mind you need by providing a team of professionals to check in on your loved one to ensure that they are in good health and spirits. A member of the Senior Helpers’ Care Team will check in regularly with your loved one to ensure their wellbeing. Visits and calls are conducted by a professional who is trained to identify areas of concern often overlooked by the family member or neighbor. That’s Senior Care, Only Better.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen or heard of a senior losing control of their rollator and suffering injuries like broken knee caps, hips, arms and elbows, as a result. The bottom line is that rollators are not for everyone – especially those with balance issues!
More than one in three persons over age 65 fall each year, often at home. Luckily, most of those falls don’t result in any injury with the exception of a minor bruise or scraped knee. But falling in the bathroom is an entirely different matter. Up to 80% of the falls in the home are in the bathroom.
As we age, we often have problems with our ability to smell (called olfactory dysfunction). Older people might not be able to identify an odor or differentiate one odor from another. In some cases they might not be able to detect an odor at all. These odors could be the rotten egg smell used in natural gas and propane or even the smell of food gone bad!
You see them everywhere! Seniors with those ugly, unsafe yellow tennis balls on their walker! Yee gads! There is a safer and cheaper alternative – Walker glide skis.
If your Mom has to use a step stool to be able to get into bed something needs to be done because this is an extreme fall risk! Not only can she fall off of the stool, but the height of the bed itself is also a risk that she might slide out of the bed and hit the floor with enough force to break a hip!
A common issue our clients face is mobility while using durable medical equipment (DME) like wheelchairs and walkers in their home. Some doorways are just too narrow to get through with the equipment. So, what do you do short of calling a contractor for a remodel?
Each of the 5 aforementioned critical areas of success are measured and receive their own score in the assessment process for the senior. These scores allow a plan of care to be developed with the family that will subsequently increase the chance of success for the senior by working together to move each individual score to a safer zone. For example, if there are 60 safety risks identified (trip hazards, poisons, bed height) we would want to reduce the number of safety risks to 40 or below to increase the chance of success for the senior in their environment.
There are many reasons for these failures in the senior population including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and many other chronic diseases for sure. However, there are a significant number of “failures” caused directly by non-medical factors that can take many good years away from our loved ones such as: safety factors, falls, improper medication management, diet, hydration and many more.
As Nurses or Social Workers working with patients on the road to recovery from the hospital or rehab, or working with seniors trying to maintain as much independence as possible at home, you understand better than anyone that the transition home is far more complex than your patients or families understand.