How far do you live from your mom? While most family caregivers are within 20 minutes, 11% of family caregivers are an hour or more from their parents. It can make it difficult to help out as much as your parent needs. When you’re a long-distance family caregiver, how do you make sure your mom’s not struggling to take care of herself? What can you do to help her when she needs help but doesn’t want to leave her home and move to your area? Is it time to hire personal care at home providers?
Talk to Her Regularly
Personal Care at Home Cranford NJ – Are You a Long-Distance Family Caregiver?
Talk to your mom regularly. Aim for a daily call or, at a bare minimum, every few days. If possible, invest in technology that your mom can use to chat with you over a video call. With services like Facetime and Google Chat, it’s easy to do.
While you’re chatting, make sure that she sounds good, looks like she’s eating and drinking enough, and that she’s clean and groomed. If she’s wearing a heavy sweater in the middle of a heatwave, it’s indicative of a problem.
Visit When You Can
Visit as often as you can. During your visit, check her home for any noticeable issues that should be addressed. Go through her medications and make sure expired medications are not filling her medicine cabinet.
Is her laundry done? Has she dressed appropriately, or does she seem to struggle with the clothing she should be wearing for the weather conditions? How do her skin, hair, and nails look? Also, it’s important that you gauge if she’s showering correctly or often enough.
If her grooming and hygiene are off, it’s important to set up personal care at home aides to help out. They can also help your mom with ambulation and toileting.
Get to Know Her Neighbors and Local Friends and Install Smart Technology
Make sure you know your mom’s friends and neighbors. If there is an emergency, you’ll be relying on them to help her. You want them to have your contact information. Someone should be able to help her get to her doctor or call paramedics if needed.
Set your mom’s home up with smart technology to make it easier to track some of the things in her home. If her home’s heating system or AC broke down, you could get an alert on your phone telling you. You can call technicians for her if needed.
There are also sensors you can put under sinks and on boilers or water heaters to alert you to leaks. Those can also be very helpful in catching issues when they’re still minor.
A video doorbell allows you to answer your mom’s door remotely. If a salesperson or person looking for your mom to sign a petition or donate money is at the door, you can send them away.
Arrange Personal Care at Home Services
You may not live close enough to help out each day, but your mom doesn’t have to struggle with grooming and hygiene. Personal care at home services offer the helping hand she needs with showering, skincare, nail care, dressing, toileting, and oral care. Call our personal care at home representative to learn more.
If you or an aging loved one are considering hiring Personal Care at Home Services in Cranford NJ, call the caring staff at Helping Hands Home Care today at 908-418-4299.
Providing Home Care Services in all of Northern and Central NJ, including Clark, Westfield, Cranford, Scotch Plains, Rahway, Linden, Summit, Edison, Elizabeth, Mountainside, and the surrounding areas.
After graduating from Seton Hall University with a BS in finance Helping Hands Homecare’s Owner / President, Robert D’Arienzo, went to work on Wall St. for six years. However, after Robert’s grandmother became ill with stomach cancer Robert and his family needed to find assistance in the home for her. After many trials and tribulations Robert could see that there was a great need for quality home care services here in NJ and loved the idea of being able to assist other families who were going through what his family went through with his beloved grandmother.
Thus, Robert had found his passion. After almost a year of preparation Robert opened Helping Hands Homecare in 2003. Robert wanted Helping Hands Homecare to focus on providing the highest quality of caregivers, exceptional customer service, and providing a service that familys could depend on in their time of need. Since then Helping Hands has assisted hundreds of individuals with the simplest of needs to more complex cases while preserving those standards set out many years ago.
Robert is a Google Verified Author
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