Is Your Senior Arguing with You about Bathing and Grooming?
Arguments about when your senior last bathed or when she last brushed her teeth are probably the last thing you want to have with your elderly family member. Unfortunately, those heated conversations can be common.
How Often Does She Really Need a Shower?
Home Care Philadelphia, PA: Personal Care and Seniors
You might feel as if your elderly family member needs to take a shower or bath every single day. She might disagree and insist on a shower once a week, if that often. Is there a happy medium you can aim for instead? If your senior is really physically active, she might need a shower more often. But if she’s not, she might be right about not necessarily needing one every day. Using body wipes can help her and you to reach a compromise in between showers.
Help Her Choose Clothes
Changing clothes and wearing appropriate clothes for the weather might be a problem you and your senior encounter, too. One solution that can help is to choose clothes with your senior. Offer her choices from clothing that’s appropriate. If you lay out that clothing together, she might be more interested in changing clothes.
Check out What’s Going On
You might not have a full picture of what’s happening. For instance, your senior might tell you she’s showering, but you’re noticing she is wearing the same clothes. You don’t want to call her a liar, but you’re still not sure. Investigative work might help. Things like a damp towel or shower stall or a toothbrush that is still wet can help you to see that she’s probably telling you the truth, even if she’s putting the same clothes back on.
Get Some Extra Help
In some cases, what’s really happening is that your senior needs help, but she doesn’t want that help to come from you. It’s not personal and it’s not that she doesn’t trust your help, but these are embarrassing tasks. It might help to hire home care providers to give your senior a hand with things like bathing, dressing, and other personal care tasks. That can help more than either of you realize.
Whatever your elderly family member’s arguments are around personal care, it’s important to try to understand why she’d feeling the way she’s feeling. From there you can start to put plans in place that help her to have what she needs in the way of assistance without completely overriding what’s important to her.
Excerpt: Lots of seniors start to have issues around personal care tasks, like grooming and bathing.
If you or an aging loved one are considering Home Care Philadelphia, PA please contact the caring staff at True Direct Home Health Care today.
Doc, as he is called by everyone - staff, patients and clients - first experienced home health care and hospice care while as a colleg student at King's College as he cared for his mother every day while she first battled COPD and then lung cancer. It was during this time that he came to understand that caring for a patient was more than just clinical expertise.
"Admittedly, my strongest attribute is my communication skills and the simple fact that I love to help people. Even the smallest thing you can do for someone really can mean so much to them long term. In fact, it could change them forever. That's what providing quality personal home health care should be all about."
In his spare time, he cooks for homeless shelters and children's music and arts events. He also is highly involved in his local youth sports soccer academy as a coach and Board member.
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