4 Fun Mood-Boosters for Aging Parents (Guest Post)
If you are one of the over 40 million family caregivers in the U.S. providing care for an aging parent or relative, chances are you wear several hats including chauffeur, insurance wrangler, cook, housekeeper, pharmacist, nurse, and therapist. The truth is that many seniors struggle with feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and depression, and it falls to their care network to help them stay positive and seek help.
Everything from hearing loss to mobility impairment can strip a senior of their sense of independence and self-reliance, so finding creative and fun ways to boost their mood is a must. Check out these top ideas:
Give Their Mobility Aid a Makeover
If having to use a cane, walker, or wheelchair has your loved one feeling down in the pits, help them embrace the situation more positively by upgrading their mobility aid with some helpful add-ons. Personalize your wheelchair or your loved one’s with helpful accessories like bags, baskets, and hanging pockets that make toting around personal items easier. Decorate their cane or walker with a bright-colored paint job. Add padded grip covers and cushions for extra comfort or don their cane with a helpful wrist strap.
Volunteer Together
Few things fill the heart quite like helping others. Even if your aging parent isn’t able to get out of the house to help at the food pantry or join the walk-a-thon, they can still make a difference in the lives of others right from home. Online tutoring, making a meal for a local children’s shelter or neighbor in need, joining a local political group to make calls or do neighborhood canvassing, putting together bags of toiletries, water, socks, and snacks for homeless people . . . the ideas are endless. Serving others helps to re-instill a sense of purpose in your loved one’s life and can be just the silver lining they’re looking for.
Video Chat Faraway Friends and Family
Maintaining strong social connections and interacting with other people goes a long way to fighting depression in seniors as well as keeping their minds sharp. It’s not easy to make long trips to see faraway relatives and friends, and talking on the phone isn’t always the clearest experience. Set up a free, live video chat for your loved one instead with services like Skype or Google+ Hangout. You will need a webcam/mic if you don’t already have one installed on your computer, however, it’s super easy to video call someone over Wifi (for free!) and chat with them face to face.
Listen to Music
A growing body of research is pointing to more and more benefits when it comes to the idea of ‘music therapy’. Music has not only been shown to help thwart motor impairment associated with conditions like Parkinson’s disease, but it can also improve mood and help relieve stress. For older adults with dementia, listening to nostalgic music from their younger years may help stimulate stronger memory and cognitive functioning too. Free services like Spotify and Pandora let you create playlists of songs based on genres and artists your loved one enjoys, try them out today!
Guest Blog: How Long-Term Care Facilities Can Reduce Hospital Readmissions
Reducing hospital readmissions is a noble goal for any long-term care facility, wound care practice, or other medical professional to work towards. Going up through the supply chain of medical care, we even find this shared vision amongst the professionals and companies which ensure that necessary prescriptions, medical products, and other shipped goods, land in the right hands at the right time. In short, reducing hospital readmissions represents a major community responsibility, and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
However, in long-term and wound care, this goal isn’t always so easy to achieve.
Nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and other medical care-adjacent companies can greatly help themselves and their communities’ health infrastructures by adopting practices which reduce the number of residents who have to be readmitted to hospitals and other healthcare facilities. This phenomenon is known as re-hospitalization, or sometimes less formally as bounce-backs.
Hospital readmission is a very real and significant problem in America today. Studies have shown that one in five elderly patients are readmitted to their healthcare facility within 30 days after departing, and one-third of patients 65 or older are readmitted within three months. This results in Medicare costs that exceed $17 billion total every year.
In response, some insurers are adopting harsh penalties on patients with high readmission rates. As a result, healthcare providers are reassessing their relationships with long-term care providers in an attempt to address this issue. Beyond the issue of the need to improve patient care, this comes with very real consequences for home care agencies. The ratings awarded to such agencies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are also affected by readmission rates, and an agency with poor ratings in this area can dramatically decrease its reimbursement levels.
Greater Attention to Patients with High Risk of Re-Hospitalization
An effective method for dealing with this problem is for caregivers in long-term care facilities to develop ways of identifying those patients who are most likely to experience difficulties, and to enact measures to help them before these situations develop into crisis situations. A few specific techniques for achieving this are outlined below.
When patients first return home after a stay in a healthcare facility, they may have difficulties readjusting to their surroundings. This, in turn, increases the risk of falls and other injuries that may result from mobility issues. Caregivers can reduce these risks by looking for ways to simplify the spaces that recently-returned residents have to navigate. Similarly, caregivers should ensure that a resident has readjusted to life at home before undertaking physical therapy or other activities that may be overly-taxing for them.
Research has indicated that over 30% of bounce-backs among elderly patients result from the mismanagement of medications. Facilities can address this by reconciling medications often, and by providing reminders to their residents regarding the use of their medications.
Language barriers between a patient and staff at a long-term care facility, or patients whose cognitive condition makes it difficult for them to understand instructions, may leave them unwilling or incapable of following their caregivers’ guidance. This can be circumvented by asking the resident to repeat any instructions they are given, so that the caregiver can be certain that they were properly heard and understood.
Practical Techniques to Avoid Re-Hospitalization
The installation of sensor technology in residents’ rooms can also allow staff to react more quickly in an emergency, thus reducing the likelihood that minor incidents may develop into more serious issues. Data suggests that equipping residents’ homes with sensors can reduce bounce-backs by nearly 50%. Facilities can also make it easier for residents to receive non-emergency visits from healthcare providers within the facility itself, rather than going to a hospital.
Caregivers at a facility should also be provided with clear lines of communication with other staff members to ensure that everyone is getting the information they need to address the needs of patients who are more acutely at risk. These communications should be well-documented, both to ensure the accuracy of the information exchanged, and to place responsibility where it belongs when something does go wrong. This can also be aided by establishing electronic health record protocols for the residents in a facility. These methods can also help to guarantee strong clinical oversight, which further ensures success in at-home treatment.
When re-hospitalization does occur, facilities should be prepared to examine the reasons why it happened in order to figure out what changes might have led to a better outcome for the patient. Statistics suggest that approximately 75% of hospital readmissions could have been avoided with better procedures in place.
Lastly, care facilities need to ensure that all of their staff are adequately trained to deal with a range of medical issues. Facilities who trained their caregivers in CPR and infection control, for example, saw 24% fewer readmissions in the first year after training and 41% during the second year.
Benefits of Treating Patients within a Long-Term Care Facility
Besides avoiding penalties, long-term care facilities have much to gain by addressing the problem of re-hospitalization among their residents.
Patients who spend less time outside the facility have more opportunities to participate in scheduled activities such as hobbies, physical therapy, and social interactions. A routine visit by a healthcare provider at a facility can be as brief as 15 minutes, leaving the patient free to go about his or her life as normal. This is as opposed to in-hospital treatment, which can often take an entire day or more.
Secondly, if residents are seen by healthcare providers in their homes, they can usually be accompanied by their regular facility nurse. This can greatly aid communication and ensure that the provider receives as much information as possible when planning treatments for a patient. This also reduces the time it takes to identify wound-related complications. In some cases, the patient may not be able to communicate at all with the healthcare facility, so the nurse may be the only person with necessary information about their needs.
Additionally, allowing healthcare providers to see their patients in a facility greatly reduces the transportation costs they would otherwise incur by taking the resident to a clinic and back. If this is the case, the facility must then undertake the fees associated with the wound care visit, as well as the cost of seeing the healthcare provider. When healthcare professionals can see their patients at a facility, it eliminates all costs apart from the price of the professionals’ services. It also greatly reduces the amount of time that a patient must wait before he or she can receive treatment for an injury.
These are just some examples of the steps that long-term care facilities can take to prevent and decrease hospitalizations, improve the level of service they provide to their residents, and reduce their own risks and costs. Developing better strategies for preventing rehospitalization and allowing healthcare professionals to see residents in their homes are both a win-win for everyone involved.
Guest Blog: Auto Safety Tech Innovations That Will Excite Boomer Drivers
As automotive technology has improved, increasingly more consumers are seeking out that technology during the car shopping process. Every year, the rate at which technology changes personal transportation accelerates. As a matter of fact, NY speeding violations lawyer http://www.zevgoldsteinlaw.com/ quotes General Motors CEO Mary Barra; “We’re going to see more change in the next five to ten years than we’ve seen in the last 50.”
For baby boomers, who are hoping to stay on the road for as long as possible, this is more important than ever. The question many consumers find themselves asking, however, is what technologies will make their way into the mainstream market and which ones will remain in the realm of science fiction. In the very near future, there are 25 advanced car technologies that we expect to see making their way into showrooms.
- Intelligent Brake Lights are being developed that indicate whether a driver is stopping quickly or simply decreasing acceleration.
- Smart Windshields will use augmented reality to help display key information about what’s happening on the road.
- Night Vision Enhancements make it easier for seniors and others with night vision troubles to see when they’re out on the road at night, removing obstacles that might create an earlier curfew for seniors.
- Automated Parking Systems make parking easy. Simply put the car into parking mode and it will slide itself into the parking space—perfect for those who have started to see their motor skills deteriorating.
- Lane Departure Warning Systems don’t just help distracted drivers who might have wandered out of their designated lane. They’re also designed to help elderly drivers who may struggle to keep their car inside the lane when they’re driving.
- Crash Notification and Avoidance Technologies recognize the conditions that can lead to an accident, from someone running into the road to a car slamming on its brakes ahead. Some of them are designed to notify drivers so that they can react. Others may even slam on the brakes or have another reaction to help avoid the collision.
- Blind Spot Detection and Back-Over Prevention Systems note any time there’s something behind the car or in a blind spot, making it easier to avoid accidents.
- Fatigue Warning Systems analyze driver behavior and notify them when they are becoming fatigued, letting drivers know when it’s time to pull over for a while.
- Forward Collision Warning with Auto Brake notices when accidents are going to happen and puts on the brakes to avoid them.
- Self-Driving Cars were the technology of the future just a few short years ago. Now, however, they’re becoming a very real possibility, removing the responsibility of driving the car from the senior’s shoulders.
- Driver Override Systems recognize when drivers are accelerating faster than the driver intended, such as when the gas pedal is slammed instead of the brake. The unsafe response is then overridden.
- Biometric Vehicle Access offers an even greater level of safety and protection, pulling together the safety systems needed by an individual driver based on biometric scans.
- Comprehensive Vehicle Tracking lets you know where your car is at any moment. It’s a fantastic resource for children who might worry about their elderly parents wandering off.
- Active Window Displays bring GPS and other apps straight to the windshield, removing the need to look away in order to effectively use those apps.
- Remote Vehicle Shutdown allows a car to be shut down from a distance—especially effective in conjunction with the GPS tracking that will let adult children know if their parents are out of the geographic area where they should be traveling. This feature is one of 10 advanced car technologies predicted by Forbes contributor Karl Brauer by 2020.
- Active Health Monitoring is something nearly everyone is now familiar with. Active health monitoring in a vehicle allows drivers to know when their health isn’t adequate to safe driving.
- Reconfigurable Body Panels change the shape of the car, making it possible to use a single vehicle for many purposes.
- Tablet Transforming Steering Wheels use gesture control, similar to what’s used on a tablet screen, to make cars easier to maneuver—even for those with joint problems.
- High-Tech Car Seats with Stress Gauges help drivers stay calm behind the wheel, shifting responses to help create a safer driving experience.
- Dashboard Safety Integration provides safety information on the dashboard, where it’s easy to view while driving.
- Augmented Reality provides warning messages and other key information on the windshield, making it easier to see obstacles and other concerns.
- Hydrogen-Powered Fuel Cell Cars combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce the power for fuel cells that run the car—truly the car of the future.
- Rotating Motorized Lounge Chairs provide an increased level of comfort for drivers who might otherwise have trouble in the car.
- Eye-Tracking Holographic Dashboard technology uses gestures and eye movements to allow apps to be accessed without needing to touch the screen.
- Autopilot systems, like self-driving car technology, provide drivers with the safe travel they need without reducing their independence.
These new technologies have helped make traveling by car safer than it ever has been before. This is particularly true for older drivers who may need additional assistance behind the wheel. This offers a significant improvement in quality of life for aging baby boomers who may no longer feel safe behind the wheel. New technology, however, prepares the way for them to drive longer.