Dr. Mauk\'s Boomer Blog

Each week, Dr. Mauk shares thoughts relevant to Baby Boomers that are aimed to educate and amuse.

Guest Post: 5 Things to Do If You Fall

Not only are 1 out of 4 seniors experiencing a fall each year, but new data shows that more seniors are dying from falls than were a decade ago. While you can absolutely take steps to help prevent falls like decluttering pathways in your house, installing grab bars and safety rails around the bathroom and stairs, utilizing mobility tools and orthopedic aids, and exercising regularly to maintain balance and coordination, it is also critical that seniors and their caregivers know what to do in the event of a fall.

Keep these important steps in mind to limit injuries and prevent critical complications if you fall:

1. Check for injuries – when you fall, you may know right away if you have hurt yourself. Pain, discomfort, swelling, blood, and bruising will signal that there is an injury. Sometimes, however, you may not see or feel any of these symptoms immediately because your adrenaline is rushing or you are confused or disoriented.

It is key that you take a few minutes to calm your breathing and get back in touch with your body. Slowly move your feet, legs, arms, and hands. Do not attempt getting back up if you are dizzy.

2. Roll onto your side – this will allow you to rest briefly and double check you are not injured.

3. Pull yourself up onto your knees and hands – from this position you can crawl to a nearby piece of sturdy furniture or stairs on which you can pull yourself up.

4. Support your weight with your hands – place one hand at a time on a flat surface of the piece of furniture and lift your strongest leg up so your knee is bent and your foot is pressed to the floor.

5. Slowly rise to your feet – using your arms and legs, push up slowly bringing both your feet under you to stand up. Find something to sit on nearby, i.e. a chair, to rest and catch your breath.

If you are unable to get up after a fall, call for help right away. If no one is with you but you are able to safely use your mobile phone, call 911 for help. Any potential injury to your neck, spine, or internal organs does require immediate attention so it is absolutely ok to call emergency services for help.

If you fall and are both by yourself and without a phone or medical alert device, on the other hand, keep calling out for help as your energy allows, banging on a nearby wall if reachable, and keep your body moving, even if only slightly, to stay warm.

By Jim|2024-01-29T11:54:54-05:00February 19th, 2024|Dr. Mauk's Boomer Blog, News Posts|Comments Off

Inpatient Rehabilitation Hospitals: The Best Setting for Stroke Recovery

By Jim|2024-01-29T11:54:38-05:00February 17th, 2024|Dr. Mauk's Boomer Blog, News Posts|Comments Off

Guest Blog:The Advantages Of Hiring A Home Care Consultant For Your Business

Hiring a home care consultant for your business can make a huge impact on the credibility

of the services you provide. Home care professionals are highly sought after by people who need help with caring for their aging loved ones. As a business owner, you can build authority as a home care provider and subject matter expert by collaborating with a consultant.

Of course, not just any consultant will work for your business and its home care goals. There are different skills you want to look for in the person that you hire. But the skills that you settle on will ultimately depend on your business size, the breadth of your services, and obviously, your bottom line. That’s why you’ll want to properly vet your potential home care consultants before you bring them onto your team.

In this article, we will cover the benefits of hiring a home care consultant for your business. We’ll also make sure you’re clear on what to look for in a candidate and their background. Read on

to discover how a home care consultant can positively impact your business and the home care services it provides.

You Decide What Background You’re Looking For

There is no one-size-fits-all background to look for when hiring a home care consultant. In fact,

It’s a common misconception that home care professionals need to all have extensive medical backgrounds. This is not at all the case, although some quality home care consultants may come from a health-related background.

If you want to take a deeper dive into your candidate’s background, you can get in touch with your local licensing board that certifies home care professionals. Many of these licensing boards, what they ask for from a person looking to become certified, and their criteria to meet change, based on what state you’re in.

Whatever your candidate’s background looks like, though, there are still some key things to look for above all else. These qualities will ultimately benefit your company and your clients’ experience with your services. Good communication, empathy, patience, and dedication — these are just a few attributes in a candidate that will make a huge impact on your clients. Interview your clients – multiple times, if you’d like – to make sure that they have these essential qualities.

You Can Build Relationships with Consultants

Simply put, it’s easier to build a relationship with someone on-one-one, rather than indirectly or through a third-party like home care staffing agencies. Home care consultants bring personal-level traits like loyalty and empathy, without the bureaucratic baggage and extra steps that you deal with when hiring through an agency. Building a relationship with a consultant early-on is a great way to get a sense of their experience and quality of service.

Once you’ve gotten to know a consultant well, it’ll be much easier to introduce them to your potential and existing clients. It’ll be obvious that you have a trusted relationship with your consultant when you can introduce them naturally while still providing a lot of detail about what they can offer.

Another advantage of working with an individual consultant is meting out more manageable pay. It tends to cost a lot more to hire home care consultants through an agency or other third party. Since you’re only negotiating pay and setting rates with one person, the time from sourcing candidates to hiring them is usually much quicker. Think carefully about how much you can budget for hiring home care professionals — chances are, a consultant will make much more sense for your business’s bottom line.

You Can Easily Evaluate Performance

The last thing that you want is for your home care services to suffer without you knowing about it. When you hire a home care consultant, it’s much easier to evaluate their performance and track their growth than it is when working with an agency. With a home care consultant, you can coordinate a performance tracker with them to make sure they know how to satisfy your business needs.

You can start this process during the hiring phase when you outline with your consultant what your requirements for their performance are. After your consultant understands what your business needs are and what your clients expect from them, they can closely work with you to make sure they’re meeting your expectations. Remember, if you’re not clear with your consultant about what’s required of them early on, they’ll struggle to meet your performance standards.

A huge benefit to setting a one-on-one performance plan and schedule with a consultant is reducing your risk of time lost. It’s much more difficult to plan performance expectations through an agency, evaluate them as having met your standards, and confirm with the person being cared for that they’re satisfied. With a consultant, your business doesn’t risk wasted time, effort, and money on a home care professional that isn’t on the same page as you.

It Helps Make a Name For Your Business and its Services

Hiring a home care consultant of your own simply gives your business more credibility than hiring through an agency. When you work with a consultant, you directly coordinate the way they behave with your client, which means you’re responsible for determining what your client needs are, and making sure they’re met one-hundred percent of the time. If you go with the agency route, you’ll never be sure that you’ll have the same caregiver for any real length of time, which hurts your clients’ overall experience.

Go with a home care consultant to increase your chances of having someone reliable who can stick around for the long haul. All too often, hiring through an agency means you’ll get a rotating door of individuals with varying levels of experience and skills.

A home care consultant with whom you build up trust and a relationship will make a world of difference in the quality of care your business offers in the longer-term. Your clients will recognize your business as a reliable source of expertise, rather than an outsourcing agency that doesn’t understand what its clients really want from their home care.

By Jim|2024-01-29T11:54:26-05:00February 15th, 2024|Dr. Mauk's Boomer Blog, News Posts|Comments Off

Guest Blog: Self-Care for Seniors: 4 Best Ways to Prioritize Your Health

The golden years come with their advantages. There’s the newfound freedom, for example, and the chance to relax and revel in all that you have accomplished. But your retirement years also bring age-related challenges that can really put a damper on enjoying them. It’s important for seniors to place high priority on their health and well-being, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are four ways that you can place yourself first.

Social Well-Being
Although retirement usually includes the benefit of having more free time, having extra time on your hands can also have its disadvantages, especially if you live alone. Too much idle or alone time can lead to boredom, unhealthy inactivity, and even depression. Here a couple of activities to consider if you’re feeling isolated or unstimulated.

Get a part-time job
Finding a part-time job in retirement has its advantages. Not only will you have a little extra cash coming in, but you’ll meet new people and feel a sense of responsibility that you may be missing from your working years.

Senior Citizen Groups and Clubs
Joining and participating in senior groups, clubs, and organizations is often free or inexpensive, and some will even provide transportation. You can find groups that are general interest as well as others that focus on specific activities and niches.

Ensure Home Safety
Making sure that your home is a safe place to be is important for anyone, but it’s perhaps especially vital for seniors who are more at risk of falling as well as those who live alone. Here are four simple ways to make your home a safer place.

Bathing
Installing grab bars is one way to provide added safety when bathing. You can also invest in hands-free toiletry dispensers that save you the hassle of slippery bar soap or handling bulky containers.

Air Quality
It’s impossible to know exactly what toxins may be lurking in your household air, but there are steps you can take to reduce them. You can protect your home’s air quality by replacing air filters regularly and having your HVAC system checked by a repairman.

Natural Cleaning Products
Because of the current social awareness of toxins found in many cleaning and hygiene products, it has become easier to find brands that make products using only natural ingredients. You can also easily mix your own natural cleaning products using things like vinegar or lemon juice.

Maintain a Balanced Diet
There are a number of things that can hinder seniors from getting proper nutrition. These include a lack of transportation, dwindling finances, and medications that cause nausea or reduce appetites. It’s important for you to make healthy food choices at all ages. Try eating foods high in omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, and fiber, as well as drinking plenty of water.

Gentle Exercise
As a senior, it’s more important than ever to exercise regularly, and the good news is that you don’t have to put out a lot of effort. Just 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week will suffice. Walking, yoga, or swimming are gentle and effective forms of exercise for seniors. If you don’t have access to a pool at home and don’t have your own transportation, you may be able to find a senior swimming group similar to the ones discussed above that offers transportation. Then, your exercise regimen could include a social outlet as well.

By Jim|2024-01-29T11:53:27-05:00February 9th, 2024|Dr. Mauk's Boomer Blog, News Posts|Comments Off

Guest Blog: How Wearable Technology Can Benefit Your Health

It’s no surprise that in the digital age, in addition to apps and online services, wearable technology is paving the way for better health outcomes for people of all ages. What exactly is wearable technology? Essentially any portable device which you can wear on your person, like a necklace, pendant, bracelet, clip, and so on, that serves a technological function like syncing fitness and medical data to the cloud, or sending alert signals to call for help.

Wearable technology continues to evolve and benefit people’s physical and emotional health. Check out how in this quick guide:

Medical Alert Technology
If you have mobility issues, have been hospitalized or gone to the E.R. in the past year, or simply suffer from a condition where you may require fast access to emergency services (i.e. diabetes, Parkinson’s), you may be looking into getting a medical alert system. While stationary medical alert systems in your home are helpful, so are wearable medical alert accessories when you head out the door.

Portable medical alert accessories may range from pendants to clip-ons to bracelets and serve a variety of purposes. Often most affordable but most overlooked is the novelty medical alert bracelets which feature a metal plate engraved with your personal and health information including an emergency contact. More technologically-advanced bracelets, however, come equipped with a discreetly hidden USB drive that stores all your personal health information. Other medical alert accessories feature buttons, on a necklace, for example, that can be pushed to give off loud alarm sounds and ward off potential attackers or call someone for help.

Fitness
Wearable fitness trackers like Fitbit, Bellabeat, and Motiv Ring all continue to be popular accessories among younger generations, however, they have their place with the senior demographic too. A wearable fitness tracker is typically like a watch, pendant, or piece of jewelry you wear that can track important health data based on the activity of your body. More closely monitoring your physical activity can help you better achieve your fitness goals and maintain a healthy weight.

Important information like the number of steps you take in a day, your pulse rate, sleep patterns, calories burned, oxygen utilization, and fitness goals achieved can all be tracked these days with this type of advanced wearable technology. If you would rather not wear anything additional and simply take advantage of the smartphone you carry around in your pocket anyway, looking into the Health app(s) available to you via your phone’s operating system or app library. You can both enter personal health data in there as well as track physical activity and more.

Posture
Are poor posture habits a pain in your neck (literally)? While “sitting up straight” might seem like your only course of action, turns out there are technological solutions designed to help you as well. Apps like Perfect Posture and Posture Zone can be downloaded to your phone and customized to alert you (via vibrations in your pocket) when you are slumping or slouching.

Wearable accessories like Lumo Lift Posture Coach are even more discreet, lightweight solutions you wear near your collarbone. This posture coach tool uses biomechanical motion sensors to track both your activity levels as well as your posture during the day. If you start to slouch or crane your head and shoulders forward, it gently vibrates to alert you to fix your posture.

By Jim|2024-01-29T11:53:12-05:00February 7th, 2024|Dr. Mauk's Boomer Blog, News Posts|Comments Off

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