Understanding What 24-Hour Home Care Can and Cannot Offer After a Stroke
Your dad had a stroke, and that’s going to require your family to make some decisions. His medical team may recommend sending him to a rehabilitation community for several weeks to recover. Once that happens, he’ll come home to complete his recovery.
You have to brace your family for the fact that your dad may always require a cane, walker, or wheelchair. Many stroke patients never restore full use of the affected leg and arm. He might not fully regain his speech.
When your dad’s mobility and motor function change, he’s going to need assistance with personal care, ambulation, and housekeeping. Sometimes, the help he needs may be in the middle of the night. For that reason, 24-hour home care services are essential.
How Home Care Helps
24-Hour Home Care in Darby, PA: Understanding Strokes
Home care aides help with any of the activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living that your dad cannot handle. This includes things like light housekeeping and laundry. His caregivers can change his sheets, make his bed, and put laundry away.
If he feels unsafe at night, he can have a caregiver in his home at all hours. If he wakes up and needs help getting to the toilet, his caregiver is nearby and ready to assist. Should he have an accident, his caregiver can help him get cleaned up, changed into dry pajamas, and change his sheets.
Does he need rides to his physical, occupational, and speech therapy sessions? His caregivers can drive him. They can help keep track of his schedule, too.
Your dad will have medications to take each day, and his caregivers can remind him when it’s time. They’ll help him with showers and dressing. If he needs help with personal care, that’s another way they assist their clients. He can have the caregivers help him with oral care and shaving.
Things 24-Hour Home Care Cannot Do
Caregivers cannot help your dad with medical care needs. If he requires feeding tube treatments, you cannot ask home care aides to help. They cannot clean incisions, administer IV medications, or manage catheter care. That type of nursing care must be arranged separately.
Talk to a 24-hour home care specialist about your dad’s stroke recovery plan and the value of home care as he regains his strength and mobility. His home care aides can help with many of the tasks taking up your time, freeing up your time to spend with him. Gather a list of questions and get answers so that you can book services.
If you or an aging loved one are considering 24-Hour Home Care in Darby, 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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