Questions About Home Care: When Is Home Health Care Helpful With Alzheimer’s?
Questions About Home Care: Estimates put the number of adults with Alzheimer’s disease at more than six million.
Also, there are 11 million unpaid caregivers, often family members, helping care for someone with Alzheimer’s. Having questions about home care is a natural thing to do at this point.
Home Care: Questions About Home Care
Alzheimer’s is a frustrating disease for family caregivers as forgetfulness and memory loss are just a small part of it.
Someone with Alzheimer’s can become fearful, angry, suspicious, paranoid, delusional, and violent. To manage all of these symptoms, medications, therapies, counseling, exercise, and diet are all approached.
Help with personal care, toileting, grooming, and showering become part of daily life. Medication management is important. Sometimes, that’s still not enough and it becomes essential to look at the benefits of home health care for Alzheimer’s.
Medication Management
If extreme agitation and anger occur, some medications are injected. When your mom or dad’s antipsychotic must be injected, you need skilled nurses helping out. That’s one time that you’ll rely on home health care services to ensure your parent’s important medications are injected on time.
With home health care, you can also have nurses helping with insulin and IV medications. Your parent may not need these, but if there comes a time that treatments like these are needed, it’s better to be able to have nurses treating your parent at home than in an unfamiliar office setting.
Wound Care
Falls are common as Alzheimer’s progresses. Depth perception changes and stepping up a step or onto a curb can become incredibly difficult. If your mom or dad falls and needs stitches, a nurse can take care of wound care.
The nurse can stop by, clean the wound, check it for infection, and apply new bandages. If an infection is suspected, the nurse can call the doctor for further instruction.
Occupational, Speech, and Physical Therapy
Alzheimer’s will change some of the things your parent used to do independently. Occupational therapy, speech therapy, and even physical therapy may become necessary to help with mobility, simple daily tasks like getting dressed and using a fork or spoon.
Getting back to the fall risk with Alzheimer’s, don’t be surprised if your parent does fall and fractures a leg, wrist, ankle, or hip. If that happens, your mom or dad will be working with a physical therapist to strengthen the joint again.
A wrist fracture will require daily exercises to help retain movement and strength in the wrist and hand. Therapists can come to the home and help with those exercises. You’ll help your mom or dad remember to do them on days the therapist isn’t there.
Call a home health care specialist about the other ways nurses can help out with the more challenging issues with Alzheimer’s and any questions about home care you may have. You may feel like you have no choice but to provide all of your parent’s care, but you can talk to your mom or dad’s doctor about the need to have nurses helping out with skilled nursing tasks.
If you or an aging loved-one are considering hiring Home Health Care in Warren County, PA, please contact the caring staff at LivinRite Home Care.
Call Us Today at (703) 634-9991.
Sources:
https://www.alz.org/
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