Home care has become a popular choice for elderly individuals who wish to avoid a care facility. This article explores how this type of care can help individuals access a high quality of life.
If you are exploring care plans for yourself or an elderly loved one, then you may want to examine the possibility of home care. As the name suggests, home care are care services that can be provided in the comfort of an individual’s home. This spares the heartache of leaving a home that you could have spent most of your life residing in. It allows you to stay in a place that is filled with happy memories and where you already feel comfortable. A care home won’t be for everyone and home care options provide a suitable alternative that could be incredibly beneficial.
Indeed, a lot of Australians have opted for home care instead of moving into a care facility. As of June 2020, more than 140,000 Australians were using home care support options and it is believed that this number will only increase in the coming years.
Home care does provide a range of benefits that you can not access through other care options. Here are some of the key reasons why home care can help improve the quality of life for elderly individuals.
Becoming The Modern Elder
Have you heard of the ‘modern elder?’ This is a contemporary concept that has increased in popularity over the past few years. Modern elders understand that their twilight years can be some of the best years of their life and are keen to access the support that will make this a reality.
Elderly individuals are no longer satisfied with just being cared for in a comfortable environment. Instead, they want to ensure that the care options they access will lead to an improved quality of life and ensure that their health, as well as their wellbeing, are preserved as they continue to age.
Modern elders want to use the experience of their years to ensure that they do have a fantastic time long after they retire and continue to engage in activities they love. They are involved in new projects, exciting developments in their personal life and can even be part of a force that benefits the community. Some may even return to work.
So, rather than just looking for a typical carer, elderly individuals are keen to find carers that can deliver care on the terms that they are interested in. This often means ensuring that they can continue to live an active lifestyle and remaining living at home is typically going to be a key part of this decision.
Beyond The Essentials
Elderly individuals who choose a home care plan will be able to access essential levels of support. This includes looking after the garden to arranging transportation and ensuring that they get the shopping that is required to just name a few different levels of support.
However, home care can go further than this. A key benefit of home care is that it can be personalised for the individual client, based on their needs and their goals. For instance, home care can focus on completing activities around the home that you aren’t interested in like chores while you focus on your passions and your hobbies or interests. If you have an idea for a new business, home care will give you the time to work on this.
Home care solutions can even help ensure that you can maintain what could still be quite a busy and packed personal schedule. A home carer will ensure that you do attend the right meetings and run your diary for you so you don’t have to worry about falling behind.
Home care services can also be based on helping you learn new skills. Many elderly individuals are no longer happy with letting life move on without them. Instead, they want to be up to date with the latest changes to technology and guarantee that they are ahead of the curve. The right carer can ensure clients have the time and the resources to learn these new skills in their own time.
It’s easy to assume that options like this are only available for people of a certain age. However, there is a real focus right now on ensuring that individuals past 80 still have the access to the same options as those who are younger. Australia and the world have an extensive aged population. However, this doesn’t mean that these individuals need to be in poor health or live empty lives. Home care helps elderly individuals access their full potential, even in later years.
Allowing Elders Their Right To Be Heard
Another benefit of home care is that it does ensure that an elder can access their right to be heard. A problem with care facilities is that they often deliver a cookie-cutter solution. The individual’s requirements and requests of an elder are not met or considered. Part of this is due to the limitations of this type of care setup. There is often one care focused on the needs of multiple residents. With home care, this is not the case.
Instead, the solution is completely personalised and as such can be entirely based around the needs of the individual. The elder is free to request exactly what they want from home care support. This allows for the types of scenarios that we discussed above. It also ensures that elders can maintain their independence and dignity. Ultimately, they will have more control of their life. In a care facility, it can feel like every aspect of their life is being managed by someone else. With home care, the care aspect of their life is more of an added benefit rather than the structure that their entire life is based around.
This gives home care a completely different feel and makes it a far more relaxing, comfortable, and enjoyable experience overall.
Building A Home Care Plan Based Around Happiness
Part of ensuring that a home care plan will provide a full and joyful life is ensuring that it is based around the happiness of the individual. To do this, it’s important to understand the key aspects of happiness while aging. This includes:
- Choice
- Belonging
- Autonomy
- Purpose
- Respect
All of these different factors should fit together to provide the best experience for every individual. We have already discussed several of these and how they do fit into a home care plan.
First, you need to ensure that you are giving an elderly individual the element of choice. The choices we make impacts our energy and how we feel about our place in the world. With home care, individuals are providing more freedom to choose how they want support from carers to fit into their life. Autonomy ties into this concept. You need to make sure that the care provided does not impact directly or indirectly, an individual’s ability to make their own choices in the world.
Belonging is an aspect that is well suited for homecare too. Belonging is about ensuring that individuals do continue to feel part of a community and connect to those around them, either individuals or through different groups. With home care, elders can easily choose who they want to interact with and will have more time to form different connections in the world. They can make new friends, join fresh social groups or spend time with the people who already play an important role in their life.
Furthermore, home care can ensure that elders can still get the levels of respect that they deserve. Home care allows people to continue to live the life they had before rather than feel as though they are being downgraded to a lesser role in the world.
If a home care plan is based around some of these core pillars of happiness, then it’s possible to guarantee that an elderly individual does continue to feel fulfilled in different aspects of their life.
This will provide a range of benefits that are often overlooked in other care plans. For instance, home care might ensure that individuals do not notice a negative impact on their mental and physical health. The physical health benefits of the happiness provided by a home care plans can be vast including:
- An enhanced immune system
- Lower chances of developing severe disabilities
- Reduction in levels of pain
All of this can contribute to a happier and more fulfilling life. As you can see, home care will provide a vast range of benefits to elders that might not be possible through other types of care support. Indeed, home care is rethinking the way we think about caring for elderly individuals and the type of lifestyle that they are able to access in their twilight years. At Home Caring, we are always ready to respond to the individual needs and goals of our clients, ensuring that they continue to get the quality of life they deserve.
