How to Create a Senior Home Care Plan for Your Parent

Your mom is getting older, but she has always planned to stay in her home. Senior home care is one way to ensure this happens, but how do you get started? What steps should you take to create an effective care plan for your senior?

Gather Family Members for Input

Have your siblings, cousins or other extended family spent more time with your mom than you have? Their input is important as they’ll know what they’ve noticed she cannot do on her own. They’ll know where they have to help her each week.

Ask Your Mom

Ask your mom what she needs help doing. Where does she feel she’s fine on her own? What does she find to be too hard to complete? As she shares information regarding her care needs, use her comments and requests to build a care plan.

Consult With Your Mom’s Doctors

If your mom has health issues, ask her doctors what to expect. For example, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, she can do a lot of stuff on her own. But, a few months from now, she won’t be able to drive. She’s going to need someone to take her shopping, drive her to appointments, and make sure she gets to social events on time.

Ask her doctors what care she needs now and in the future. You’ll use information like this to build a care plan to cover her needs now. As that changes, you can adjust her arrangements with home care.

Build a Care Plan Using This Input

You have a lot of input from different people. Now is the time to build a care plan that matches your mom’s current needs. Consider the tasks she cannot complete without help on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and create three lists.

For example, she may not be allowed to drive. She’s going to need someone to take her shopping every week or two. She may have monthly appointments, and she’ll need to pick up prescription refills each month. She needs a driver for all of this.

Once a week, she needs her carpets vacuumed and her laundry done. She may need a caregiver to drive her to a laundromat if she doesn’t have a washer or dryer.

Every day, your mom needs someone to remind her to take her pills, help her get dressed, and assist her after she takes a shower. She might need help in the shower.

She needs someone to cook meals for her, so she’d need a caregiver with her each day from breakfast through dinner. Your mom may want to help her caregiver cook, or she might prefer to have the caregiver do the cooking and then join her for the meal. All of these preferences need to be noted and shared with a home care specialist.

Senior home care is designed to support your mom as she ages at home. Sit down as a family and talk about the things that would help her remain independent. Once you have some ideas of what she needs, call a senior home care agency to arrange those services.

If you or an aging loved one is considering senior home care in Scottsdale, AZ, please call the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Scottsdale at (480) 284-7360. We are here to help!