Family Caregivers Archives - Golden Heart Clermont

What Should Family Caregivers Focus on During Stress Awareness Month?

Posted on March 30, 2022August 10, 2023 by Craig Bass

Personal Care at Home in Leesburg FL

It’s impossible to avoid stress. Everything you do in life can lead to stress. Problems arise when stress builds and builds without you finding a way to release it. April is Stress Awareness Month and a good time to look at what the stress of caregiving can do to your health, and how personal care at home can help.

In the U.S., 77% of Americans experience physical symptoms related to excess stress. Three out of ten people feel they deal with extreme stress. Six of the most common causes of that stress are:

Pressures at work
Money issues
Health
Changes to relationships, such as divorce or death of a spouse
Poor nutritional intake or diet
Sleep deprivation

Have you ever stopped to think about how your role as a family caregiver is causing too much stress? Your boss is pressuring you to stop being late or take so much time off. You’re worried about losing income when you have to take an unpaid day off to help your parents.

Maybe you’ve been putting off your yearly doctor’s check-up because you have no time. You eat in a rush and often get fast food or takeout on your way home from your mom and dad’s house. You live with your parents, and their insomnia keeps you up all night so you’re not getting enough sleep.

All of this impacts your mental, physical, and emotional health. It’s time to take care of yourself and learn ways to manage the stress you experience.

Learn Your Stress Triggers

Pay attention to your stress. Do you feel it building or does it hit from out of nowhere? If you’re experiencing stress, it’s important that you learn to read your body and catch the signs of building stress.

You might find yourself tensing up. It’s grocery shopping day, and you find you’re biting your fingernails. That’s a sign of excessive stress. You might notice that a headache builds each morning before you have to help your parents with their showers.

When you begin to narrow down the stress triggers, you can start working on ways to ease the tension. Before you help your parents with their morning routines, do a quick Yoga routine to ease stress and tension. Stop grocery stress by ordering online for pick-up or delivery.

Best of all, learn that you can’t do it all. It’s okay to hire others to take over your parents’ personal care needs.

Don’t Ignore Self-Care

Stress impacts your health in so many ways. You must focus on your well-being, and the best way to do this is by arranging personal care at home. Let others help out so that you can focus on self-care.

It’s time to call. Whether your mom needs Alzheimer’s home care services to help with bathing and toileting or your dad needs ALS home care for grooming and hygiene, support their needs by arranging personal care at home. Talk to a home care expert to get started.

Sources:
https://www.stress.org/about/for-the-media

If you or an aging loved one is considering personal care at home in Leesburg, FL, please contact the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Clermont today. 1-888-423-4046.

Three Ways to Help Your Mom’s Primary Family Caregiver

Posted on March 9, 2022August 10, 2023 by Craig Bass

Home Care Assistance in Minneola FL

You’re not close enough to provide the care your mom needs. You rely on another family caregiver to help your mom each day. It makes you feel helpless and even a little bit useless. How can you help out when you’re not the primary caregiver?

Order Surprise Gifts From Time to Time

Have you treated the family caregiver to a surprise recently? Order a basket of the caregiver’s favorite treats. If you know the caregiver loves a specific coffee, order some and have it delivered to your mom’s house.

Look into services that travel to the home and offer spa treatments without leaving the house. Arrange mani/pedis for your mom and her caregiver. A massage is another option that helps soothe muscle tension and ease some of the stress caregivers experience.

You could pay a local catering company or restaurant to prepare and deliver a dinner. It frees up some time for the caregiver, allowing that person to have an hour or two to relax.

Take Care of Some Care Needs Online

You might not live nearby, but what can you do from a phone or computer? Ask if you could help out by researching medication prices, insurance plans, or health issues. Compile reports from the information you find and share them with the primary family caregiver.

Another way to help is by scheduling appointments and setting up reminders. Create a spreadsheet or calendar through a sharable site, such as Google Drive. It makes it easy for the caregiver to access and keep track of upcoming appointments.

Take over refilling prescriptions. Mark a month on the calendar and check in regularly to see if medication supplies are running low. When they are, order refills and arrange to have them delivered to the house to save the caregiver a trip to the pharmacy.

You could also take over paying the bills online and keeping track of incoming retirement income. If a payment doesn’t arrive for your mom’s pension or Social Security income, you can track down where it is. When it’s tax season, you could help complete and file them too.

Hire Home Care Aides to Provide Breaks

When was the last time the family caregiver had a break? If you know that it’s been months or years, it’s time to change that. Make sure respite care is available to allow the caregiver to stay home and catch up on sleep, go out with friends, or take a vacation.

Home care assistance provides your mom’s primary caregiver with much-needed breaks. If you can help out by taking over for a bit, do so as often as you can. If it’s not possible as you live too far away, discuss the benefits of home care assistance with your family.

If you or an aging loved one is considering home care assistance in Minneola, FL, please contact the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Clermont today. 1-888-423-4046.

How Personal Care at Home Helps Long-Distance Family Caregivers

Posted on February 8, 2022August 10, 2023 by Craig Bass

Personal Care at Home in Center Hill FL

About one out of ten caregivers live at least an hour from their parents. You live in another state, but your parents need additional help if they’re going to retain their independence while aging at home. What do you do when you live too far away to help more than once or twice a year?

Research Personal Care at Home

Look into personal care at home services. Instead of hoping your parents are okay every day, you can hire caregivers to stop in each day or once a week and see how they’re doing. If they need anything, the home care aide takes care of things for you.

Suppose the caregiver arrives and finds your parents are out of milk and eggs. The caregiver helps them create a shopping list and takes them to the store. They have a helper when it comes to reading store pricing labels and carrying the bags from the car and into the house.

Personal care at home can help with organization and scheduling. Your mom and dad have different care needs, so their medical appointments often overlap. Instead of struggling to figure it out, the personal care aide can arrange appointments in a manner that makes them easy to manage. If your mom and dad are going to be in the same building, they could have appointments that follow each other or occur at the same time.

Your parents have caregivers available to help them with housekeeping. They don’t have to struggle to carry the hamper to the laundry room. Your dad no longer has to mop and vacuum. Caregivers can also cook their meals and do the dishes after.

How Do You Get Started?

It’s time to call your mom and dad and talk about their daily routines. Where do they struggle, and what do they still find easy to do? Make a list and come up with the most critical care needs from what they can’t do. That’s where caregivers are needed.

Just because you live miles from your mom isn’t reason enough to put her at risk. With the helping hand from personal care at home aides, your mom has the help she needs without you needing to move to her hometown.

Every week or so, the home care agency gives you a report. You always know how your parents are doing with their caregiver’s help. If new services are needed, or some care services seem unnecessary, you’ll learn more about that and make adjustments.

Talk to a personal care at home agency to learn more about the services that help your mom and dad remain independent at home. Ask questions, get prices, and finish the call by scheduling services.

Sources:
https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2021/05/caregiving-in-the-united-states-50-plus.doi.10.26419-2Fppi.00103.022.pdf

If you or an aging loved one is considering personal care at home in Center Hill, FL, please contact the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Clermont today. 1-888-423-4046.

Tag: Family Caregivers