What Is it Like for You When Your Senior’s Needs Are Growing?
As a caregiver, you’re going to witness your senior’s needs changing and growing. At first, you might find that to be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Keeping up with what your elderly family member needs and getting help are two of the most important solutions to keep in mind.
Activities of Daily Living and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living
Activities of Daily Living, or ADLs, and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living, or IADLs, are activities that you might need to help your senior with over time. ADLs are activities such as bathing, getting dressed, and eating. IADLs are a little more complicated. Those are activities like handling transportation needs for your elderly family member and taking over setting appointments for her.
Usually Demands Increase Gradually
In some cases, your senior’s needs may increase suddenly. But in most situations, those demands are going to increase gradually. You may start out helping your elderly family member once in a while with running some errands here and there, but that can pick up steam gradually until you realize that you’re handling more and more for your senior.
Don’t Wait to Get Help
It’s tempting to wait until you and your senior really need a great deal of help to manage everything for her. But when you do that, you end up placing more strain on yourself than you realize. Hiring elderly care providers as soon as possible allows you to ramp up their services as your senior’s needs increase. That allows you to operate from a position of managing those issues rather than having to handle everything yourself.
Periodically Assess What Your Senior Needs and How You Can Help
One way to keep yourself from being surprised by this situation is for you to periodically do an assessment of what’s going on. If your elderly family member is open to having this conversation with you, it can go a long way toward making sure that you’re meeting all of her needs, too. Doing this every couple of months might feel like a little much at first, but it can help you to keep an eye on where you stand in terms of what needs to be done and who can handle those tasks for your senior.
It’s very rare for your senior’s needs to continue on the way that they are indefinite. You’re going to experience differences in what you can do for your elderly family member and how that compares to what she truly needs.
If you or an aging loved one is considering hiring Elder Care Services in Amberley, OH, please contact the caring staff at Queen City Elder Care today. Serving Cincinnati and Surrounding Communities. Call Us Today (513) 510-4410.
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