Five Tips for Adapting to Home Care Assistance
It isn’t always easy to accept help, even when someone knows they need it. This is something that family caregivers and seniors experience all the time. Once home care assistance is in place, the trick becomes adjusting to having that help around consistently. Here are some tips that can make that process easier for families.
Go Over the Benefits
Talking about the benefits of home care services really can help so much. Sometimes families line up assistance from senior care services, but they don’t realize all the different ways that they can help. When seniors in particular understand that they can customize the help that they get based on their needs and preferences, adjustment periods can be a lot shorter.
Start a Care Plan
A care plan is the “flight plan” for everyone involved in the caregiving experience. It’s what helps everyone involved to know what to do and when to try something different. The best care plans are a collaborative effort, including input from seniors as well as family caregivers, medical providers, and home care providers. Sometimes care plans are incredibly detailed and cover every possible situation, while others might offer looser boundaries and recommendations.
Talk About How It’s Going
When home care assistance is in pace, it’s time to talk about how it’s going. Are seniors getting the help they need? Are family caregivers getting the help they need? In the end, it’s all about ensuring that the needs everyone had in the beginning are actually getting resolved. Making sure that conversations about how it’s going happen relatively often ensures that when changes need to happen, everyone is aware and can make that happen.
Consider Trial Periods
Sometimes seniors still aren’t excited about all of this and needing help from outside caregivers. One solution might be to consider trying out trial periods. This means that seniors agree to have help available on certain days or for a certain amount of time before they decide whether or not to commit. Everyone gets a chance to work out what types of help might truly be needed. Applying these trial periods offers boundaries that seniors might find more helpful.
Revisit Plans to Make Sure They’re Still Effective
Long after the adjustment period is over, families still need to talk about whether plans are still effective. Talking about how needs are changing and whether home care assistance is keeping pace with those difficulties is an important step. As seniors experience health changes, mobility changes, and more, they may need more or less help every time families revisit these plans. That’s normal, and families need a way to stay responsive to what seniors need.
Sometimes seniors need extra help but they don’t want the emotional baggage that they might associate with needing help. That makes adjusting to solutions like home care assistance difficult to do, even when they want the help these professionals can offer. Working together as a team is the best option, and family caregivers, seniors, and professional caregivers can all offer insights that make the process easier.
