Five Tips for Determining if Your Senior Needs Home Care

Are you trying to figure out if your senior really does need help from home care services? Sometimes this feels like a complicated situation for a family caregiver because you don’t want to overstep, but you also want your elderly family member to have the support that she needs. It might be time to have that conversation you’ve been avoiding.

Get to Know Your Senior’s Daily Routines

What do your senior’s routines look like on an average day? If you live far away or you haven’t spent time with her in person in a while, you might be fuzzy on these details. Knowing more about what her day looks like and the challenges that she faces can help you to offer her ideas that can better resolve some of the issues she’s facing.

Talk to Her about Her Needs

Really talk to your senior about what she needs. Is she finding it tough to keep up with laundry or with meals? There’s no shame in any of that because life is challenging for everyone. But it might just be possible that the issues she’s specifically experiencing are ones that senior care professionals are uniquely qualified to handle to make her life easier.

Listen to What She’s Sharing and to What She Isn’t Sharing

Lots of people offer default answers in situations like this one, especially along the lines of declining help and claiming that everything is going swimmingly. But what is your senior sharing with you and what is she leaving out? Sometimes it helps to be able to read between the lines a bit and see what you might be missing.

Offer Her the Benefits of Having Home Care Help

If this is your first conversation with your senior about bringing in home care providers, talk with her about what the benefits are. Let her know how they can help her specifically, whether that’s with keeping her home clean so that she doesn’t risk tripping or whether that’s making sure she’s eating healthy meals so that her blood sugar doesn’t get out of whack. Whatever concerns you’re having, share them along with a benefit of having help.

Find a Compromise if She’s Not Fully on Board

Is she still not quite on board? Look for ways to compromise with your elderly family member. It’s never a good feeling to tell her that things have to be done the way you say it or else, and you probably don’t want that for your senior. So, look for ways to convince her that having some extra help isn’t such a bad thing at all, even if that means you suggest a trial run that she can control completely.

The real concern here is that you want your aging family member to be as safe and happy in her home as possible and it might be at the stage where she can still do that, as long as she has some help. For many seniors, that help makes all of the difference in the world.

If you or an aging loved one is considering home care in Modesto, CA, please contact the caring staff at Provident Care Home Care today at (209) 578-1210.