Home Care in Frisco, TX – Empathy can Go a Long Way to Understanding Your Senior Loved One’s Limitations
Trying to see certain issues from another person’s perspective may be challenging. When you’re talking about senior home safety, as a healthy adult, you might not understand various risk factors that the elderly person is facing.
How can we pay more attention to what the elderly individual is facing and the challenges they deal with on a regular basis? First and foremost, we need to be empathetic to the various health issues the person is dealing with at any given time. For example, one of the most common problems people face as they age is a loss of muscle mass.
As we age, unless we are able to maintain the same amount of physical exercise, the body will begin to lose muscle tone. Some of those muscle cells are converted into fat cells while others are absorbed by the body. The more muscle that is lost, the less strength an individual has.
This still might not seem like a major problem, but when you start to take various daily activities into account, such as getting out of bed, taking a shower, or even bringing laundry down a flight of stairs, it should become more obvious where the risk factors are.
Take a moment to think about the various activities you do on a regular basis, paying attention to the subtle slips, minor losses of balance, and other problems that occur on a regular basis. Those things are considerable for someone dealing with various strength issues, especially in their legs. A simple, minor loss of balance could lead to a devastating fall down the stairs, in the shower, or just getting out of bed.
If the elderly patient has vision-related problems, you can emulate some of those situations using a blindfold, turning lights off in your house, and other methods to help you understand the challenges they are going to face.
Once you are able to more effectively empathize with the patient, begin to look at things in the home that they could become problematic. Focus on safety by improving the lighting in certain rooms, making objects in the kitchen more accessible (such as bringing food items down to lower cabinets or onto the countertops), or assisting the individual with laundry once or twice a week.
When you can understand how challenged an elderly individual may be due to their change in physical conditioning and strength, it’s easier to see the potential risk factors throughout the home, as it relates to senior home safety.
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