What Can You Do to Increase Your Senior’s Safety at Home?
If you’re worried about your senior’s safety when she’s at home, there may be more you can do about it than you think. Try some of these ideas to start and then branch out from there.
Rearrange Some Furniture and Big Items
Very often furniture arrangements that worked well for your senior in the past may not suit her needs now. If she’s using assistive devices, she may need a little more room in order to safely navigate in her home. Rearranging bigger furniture items can help you to find new pathways that offer up more space to accommodate your senior’s new needs.
Find a Spot for Everything
One of the things that can help immensely when you’re trying to make your senior’s home safer is to reduce clutter as much as you can. That means that everything she needs and uses needs to have a designated spot and it needs to live in that spot unless the item is in use. This might mean that your elderly family member needs to help you to reduce some of the items she’s got so that she can safely stow everything that she does use.
Put Frequently Used Items in Lower Spots
When you’re putting things in new locations, this is the perfect time to take the items your elderly family member uses often and relocate them. Keeping them in a lower spot that is easy to access means that your senior won’t have to bend and twist or worse use a stepstool to get to those items. Things your senior uses infrequently or hardly ever can go in those spots that are inconvenient to get to.
Make Sure She Has Access to Assistive Devices
If your senior does use assistive devices, part of safely utilizing them involves being able to access them easily. Canes need to be easy to grab when she’s ready to get up, for example, so that might mean making a space next to her favorite chair where she can lean her cane when it’s not in use. You may need to get a little creative, especially if your elderly family member is resistant to using those devices.
Bring in Extra Help
Having some extra help can also help your elderly family member to feel safer at home. Home care providers can take over tasks that have become physically taxing for your senior, letting her rest more during the day than she has been in the past. They can also help to ensure that she’s using her assistive devices and that clutter remains at a minimum.
Keeping your senior safe at home is a big goal, but it’s an achievable one if you look at all the different ways that she can have a safer environment.
If you are considering home care in Fairborn, OH, for an aging loved one, please contact the caring staff at Touching Hearts At Home of Dayton today at 937-558-9394.
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