Aging in place means growing old in the comfortable and familiar surroundings of your own home. Growing old in the comfortable surroundings of your home is valued more now than ever before. Research shows that moving the elderly during their frail senior years can prove to be fatally traumatic. As such, it’s critical for your loved ones to stay in their homes. Even through the challenges aging in place may present, they should be home for as long as physically possibly. To do this successfully, you need to make sure your senior loved ones have the right kind and amount of help. That is where the right home care agency and sufficient help by home health aides come into play.
Family Wants to Help
While the family may desperately want to care for their loved ones themselves, they may not be able to. They may have extensive work and family responsibilities with a schedule that is already overflowing. They also may not have the personal care and medical skills necessary for the job. Furthermore, they may have moved far away making it absolutely impossible to participate in the day-to-day hands-on care that is required. They will likely need a support system which enables them to make their loved one’s needs a priority. Choosing the right homecare services and home healthcare agency can help make this happen.
What Are Home Care Services?
There are actually lots of facets to this umbrella term. Home care can range from skilled medical care to state certified home health aides to competent companions to anything in between.
If personal care such as bathing, grooming, and hygiene have become an issue, it is time to call for help. A home care agency can find you home health aides that are paraprofessionals that can help. They maintain a bath-time routine to help avoid problems. Maybe getting around the house is an issue. Mobility assistance is also part of their job so your loved one can get in and out of bed each day as well as get around the house.
If you are worried about nutrition, the home health ensures loved ones are eating properly with regular, healthy meals every single day. A home health aide can also help with grocery shopping and meal preparation. They can take into account any special dietary requirements follow family and health care provider guidelines.
Eldercare services can also reach beyond the four walls of the home. Often an individual care plan is created to encompass all of your loved one’s needs. If your loved one can no longer navigate outside the home by themselves, a home health aide will help. They can escort them to important doctor visits or other appointments. The home health aide will ensure that their elderly client gets back and forth safely. If so desired, a home health aide can get your loved one out into the fresh air as much as possible.
What About Emergencies?
By the time it becomes necessary for you or your loved one to hire a home health aide or caregiver in the home, accidents, illness or emergency room visits have likely already occurred. These incidents often serve as the precipitating event, indicating that personalized, in-home care is important for continued health and well-being. You can have someone for as many hours of coverage as you deem necessary so that someone is always there should an emergency arise.
It’s estimated that older patients account for nearly 25 percent of all emergency room visits. These visits are due to a range of conditions, from physical illness to cognitive disorders. Additional causes or factors can include falls, dementia, delirium, and simultaneously taking several medications. These can all complicate the evaluation, diagnosis, and management of maladies in the elderly population.
It is so important to be prepared in the event of an emergency. You must be able to turn on a dime should a client or a patient go into distress. One of the ways that you can prepare is to have all medical information at your fingertips. To that end, David York Agency has devised a handy Emergency Medical Information card that the aide can grab and hand to emergency personnel or take with the patient to the hospital. DYA will be incorporating this into their intake procedures and posting it for all new clients. Non-DYA customers are free to download, print, and fill in with their seniors and family members.
We have other extremely useful publications that can help make caring for your senior loved ones easier. Please download and share as many as you wish.
Home Care Information
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the aide or caregiver will be present should an emergency event occur. However, having a healthcare professional’s record of activity, behavior and medical care available can streamline the process, ensuring the best outcome for you or your loved one. If the aide is there in when an emergency occurs, they will often accompany the senior to the emergency room and ensure continuity of care until loved ones arrive.
In a life-threatening emergency, calling 911 should always be the first course of action. In the case of other less urgent situations, a David York Agency client always has access to a registered nurse 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Need a little assistance caring for an elderly loved one at home?
Getting Started
When home healthcare becomes necessary, David York Agency would be happy to answer all your questions. To ensure you’re getting the best possible information, a free phone consultation with us is the ideal way to move forward. We’ll look at your loved one’s overall health and living situation. Then, we will recommend a plan to help both of you find solutions. From assisting with the activities of daily living to more skilled medical help, we’re here to transform your loved one’s day-to-day life.
When you choose to work with David York Agency, we begin by contacting your physician and any other concerned healthcare professional, to develop and implement the optimal home care plan to fulfill the patient’s needs. We then select capable home health aides that fit with the individual’s health requirements and living situation. For ongoing care, our Director of Patient Services carefully monitors each case and, at no extra charge. Also, regular visits are made to your home by a registered nurse to supervise your DYA caregiver.
David York Agency Has Decades of Experience
David York Home Healthcare Agency is fully acquainted with all factors related to eldercare services and is always available to set up a senior care plan taking the whole patient into account. We provide skilled home health aide services for the elderly in their home and is abreast of all the latest guidelines for seniors. Give us a call today to learn more about our available service options. We’ll help talk you through what we can do and our payment structure. We’ll even give you some tips on what you can do to help your loved one now.
To request an assessment, call our office in Brooklyn, New York at (718) 376-7755, or visit us online at davidyorkhomehealthcare.com. Our highly skilled Director of Patient Services will carefully listen to your particular caregiver needs and help customize a care plan for your specific home healthcare needs. A nurse is waiting to take your call. Visit our website at David York Agency. Please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter, or LinkedIn.
David York Agency provides high quality skilled home health aide services for the elderly and infirm with the highest degree of personal service. We can provide full-time or part-time professionals depending on your needs. We have Certified Home Health Aides (HHA), Certified Personal Care Aides (PCA), Registered Nurses (RN), and Licensed Practical Nurses (LPN). All of our aides are certified and specially trained. All of our aides are thoroughly screened, fingerprinted and checked for criminal background. We regularly check credentials and maintain valid references for our aides. You can be sure that the highest caliber health aides are caring for your loved ones.
