You can find my article here ➦ https://blipiq.com/media/blog/handling-the-challenges-of-a-nursing-home-resident-with-alzheimers/?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=engagement&utm_term=long-term-care-facility&utm_content=lisa-chirico

The post Nursing Home Care Tips for the Alzheimer’s Resident first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

For caregivers who have a family member living in a nursing home, the holiday season can present additional stresses. In fact, the entire dynamic of the holidays is different. It is critical to step back, breathe, and relax! Since much of your time and attention centers around your loved one’s life in the nursing home, it is nearly impossible for you to experience the same type of holiday season that you enjoyed in earlier days. You and your loved ones will continue to celebrate, it will just be on a different scale. The more you feel the need to replicate the holidays of years past, the more undue stress you will place on yourself.

One of the best gifts caregivers can receive is the gift of time. Learning to manage the minutes more effectively is a skill worth sharpening. Here are a few ways to find more time for yourself, while reducing your stress level, during the holiday season.

Cooking: Remember the big family get-together of holidays past with their four-course dinners followed by a variety of homemade deserts? Well, cherish that memory, but don’t try to recreate it now. Instead, become familiar with all the wonderful ways that your local grocery store deli can produce a holiday feast. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how nicely they can cook a turkey or ham dinner with all the fixings. Having a dilemma about holiday deserts? Don’t! Instead, visit your local bakery and pre-order all the treats that you used to spend hours in the kitchen preparing. If you miss the pleasant aroma of baked goods fresh from the oven, just light a candle. Today, there’s a candle fragrance for just about everything. On busy days when friends and family stop in to visit you at home, don’t be shy about using paper products instead of your holiday china, and serving no-work appetizers or other convenience foods.

Decorating: If your collection of Christmas decorations anything like my family’s, then that means you have a lot of things to unpack, untangle, and arrange. A better idea is to keep your in-house decorations to a minimum. It’s not necessary to decorate every room in your home. If you reduce your decoration quota, then once the holidays are over, you’ll have fewer things to dismantle and repack. Another wise decorating idea is to assign specific tasks to family members. Tame your inner Clark Griswold and don’t attempt to do everything yourself.

Pampering: Self-care practices are very important for caregivers. Women, in particular, have the habit of putting everyone else’s needs before their own. No matter how busy you are, the holiday season is not the time to let your beauty routine fall by the wayside. Don’t wait until the last minute to find out that there are no available appointments. Instead, make all your personal care appointments as early in the holiday season as possible so you don’t miss out on looking your best.

Shopping: My advice in this category is simple: to save more time, shop online. Also, take advantage of sales throughout the year in your local area so when December arrives, most of your shopping is done.

I close with a relevant conversation that I once overheard in a grocery store. Lady one: “How was your Christmas?” Lady two: “Pretty good; I’m glad it’s over. I don’t know, there’s just so much pressure!”

Our holiday season should never be all about pressure or tension. And, it doesn’t have to resemble the perfection of a Norman Rockwell painting. Plan to reduce your stress during the next holiday season so you can experience its joy, beauty, and magic with your family and friends. I wish you an abundance of happiness in the new year!

The post How To Find More Time For Yourself During the Holidays first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

Here is some advice that should always be followed: caregivers need to take time to take care of themselves! Looking for ideas? Here’s a few, but don’t forget that whatever you enjoy most is what you should focus on, not chores or routine tasks.

• Lounge at home in your comfortable clothes.
• Pet your animal companion.
• Watch your favorite movie.
• Take a nap
• Eat your favorite snack.
• Laugh.
• Buy yourself flowers.
• Play board games.
• Try a new recipe.
• Step away from the computer and make connections in person.
• Call a friend you haven’t spoken to in a long time.
• Write a letter to someone on real paper and mail it at the post office (text messages don’t count for this task).
• Watch the sun rise or set.
• Meditate.
• Read a book.
• Take time to enjoy some free time, and don’t feel guilty about it!

The person who you are caring for depends on you. If your health suffers, you will not be able to be there for them while they need you. I believe that self-care is comparable to a bear hug. So, give yourself the gift self-care today, and get some bear hugs back into your life!

The post Self-Care Ideas for Caregivers first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

Other family members at his nursing home have shared photos of their loved ones with me. Like our family photos, their pictures chronicle joyful times. They depict families laughing, celebrating, and appreciating life. For a few minutes, as you gaze at these preserved moments in time, you forget all about illness, disease, and the nursing home.

The goal of this post is to encourage nursing home staff to see those they take care of as more than just a part of their job. It is my hope that they take the time to see the residents as people who have lived long, full, productive, and rewarding lives. The next time they feel stressed out with their workload, I wish they would take a minute or two to do one thing – just look at the photos. ***This post was originally published in 2011 on my Blog.

The post Just Look At The Photos first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

Whether you are a spouse, daughter, son, relative, or friend of someone who has just moved into long-term care, one of the most important things you should do from the start is to make sure that the staff gets to know you. Your visible presence at their new residence will help you to obtain the kind of familiarity that is vital to good communication with everyone who comes into contact with your loved one.

The more often nursing home staff observes your visits, the more they will realize the level of involvement that you have in your loved one’s care. This is also very important. You want everyone to know that your family member has an advocate who will speak up for them, and who always has their best interests in mind.

It is also necessary to become familiar with the names and specific job functions of the nursing home staff, not only medical personnel. Just like any workplace, each and every position within the organization is valuable.

When you visit your loved one in the nursing home, you not only bring them comfort and happiness, you also help to improve the quality of care which they receive on a daily basis.

The post Getting To Know You first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

It’s WORLD ALZHEIMER’S DAY and I MISS MY DAD…He Battled Alzheimer’s Disease…Let’s Raise Awareness & Find a Cure for the disease that cannot be prevented, slowed or cured

The post It’s WORLD ALZHEIMER’S DAY and I MISS MY DAD first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

I was not only interested in venting on my blog. I also thought that by sharing my stories, I could help empower other families who were facing the same issues that we were firsthand.

Although I’m consulting caregivers now, I feel that the blog posts I created can continue to serve an important purpose. I will share those posts on this blog. I will also continue to write about issues that I believe the community of nursing home caregivers can connect with.

I invite you to sign up on this page to receive my future posts via email. Also, I want to remind you that you are not alone on this journey. I look forward to hearing from you!

The post Shining a Light on Nursing Home Care first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

I hope everyone reading this post has seen the film “Terms of Endearment” and that they recall the scene in the movie where Aurora, played by Shirley MacLaine, screams (in a really big way) at the nurse to give her daughter Emma, played by Debra Winger, a pain shot.

Aurora relays an emotion in the pain shot scene that I sometimes (actually quite often) feel at the nursing home. I cannot bear to see my Dad in pain or discomfort of any kind. All caregivers feel this way about their loved ones. Yet, these feelings are secondary when a family member moves into a nursing home. Due to Alzheimer’s disease, my Dad can no longer express himself. He is unable to get the attention of a nurses aide to ask to be taken to the bathroom, or insist a nurse give him something for an ache or pain he may have. So, his family is his voice now. We are the ones who find help for him when we know he needs it. But, what happens when the help we need is unavailable?

The nursing home where my Dad lives faces issues that I’m sure are quite similar to other skilled nursing facilities nationwide. One of those issues that I’ve observed is a shortage of staff. The phrase “we’re short-staffed today” is one I hear too many times to count. Because of this, I long to be a fly on the wall during a meeting between the home’s administrator and its controller; how interesting it would be to see where the budget cuts occur! You may find my fly on the wall desire strange, but if you experience the same staffing issues in your loved one’s nursing home that we do, you will undoubtedly share my wish to turn into a fly. Like my family, you will wonder why shifts are continuously short-staffed, and how this problem will affect the residents.

There are no good answers to these questions. The fact is, that when a nursing home is short-staffed, all the residents who live there suffer! How often do decisions about a nursing home’s profit – their bottom line – override those taken to make sure there is adequate care for the residents who live there? I am confident that if I asked any nursing home administrator or controller this question, he or she would initially laugh and then reply, “you just don’t understand what we have to deal with!”

Recently, I ran into a nurses aide that I hadn’t seen in a while. She told me that she is working at a neighboring hospital now, and occasionally works per diem at my Dad’s nursing home. Then, for some reason, she felt compelled to relay to me what the home was like back when she began working there. She described to me things that were no longer a part of the residents’ daily care. As she continued to speak, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I didn’t hold them back, I cried right in front of her, but quickly wiped away my tears so my Dad could not see them. When she saw this, she stopped reminiscing. She admitted to me that this was the reason she quit her job at the home – she could no longer stand to see people that she cared about deprived of things she believed they needed as part of their care. She knew that there was no way to regain that level of care again, and as much as it hurt her to leave the people that she thought of as family, she did.

I share this story with you to illustrate a point. If nursing homes continue to draw lines in the sand as it relates to profits versus the quality of their product (the care they offer), where does that leave the residents and their healthcare advocates? There are no easy answers, but our responsibility to ensure that humanity never takes a backseat to company profits is essential.

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

– Mother Teresa

The post Don’t Tell Me You’re Short-Staffed first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

Why is it so difficult for humans to just be nice to one another? I have noticed a lack of kindness at the nursing home where my Dad resides, and it disturbs me. Some staff members do their best to be kind to family members and the residents. Others fail at this.

It’s the little things, the things that your parents taught you when you were growing up such as: if you can’t say something nice to someone, don’t say anything; always say please and thank you; and smile at people when you have the chance.

I think many people simply don’t realize the effects of their actions, however small, on everyone they come in contact with. For instance, if I choose to smile at someone in an elevator, that simple action makes the person who I smile at feel good: I’m spreading a bit of joy their way. In turn, they will take that bit of good feeling and pass it on. A good analogy to illustrate this is the difference between opening a shade and letting light into a room, or closing a shade and keeping a room dark.

We make these little, conscious decisions daily. Something as simple as smiling at someone, or choosing instead to give that person a stony stare, makes all the difference in the world – it really does.

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
– Mark Twain

The post Why Can’t You Be Nice? first appeared on Nursinghomeology.

Sometimes, these lapses in judgement could be seen as medical errors. Other times, these “mistakes” are quality of life issues that have a big impact on my Dad. Either way, they should never be seen as petty or unimportant.

The word stupid may be one way to categorize these thoughtless actions. Merriam-Webster defines stupid as: “given to unintelligent decisions or acts: acting in an unintelligent or careless manner.”

Although we will never know someone’s justification for taking shortcuts when providing care, I believe it has something to do with that person’s compassion and sensitivity. A staff member of my Dad’s nursing home once remarked to me that compassion is not something that can be taught. I don’t agree with her.

By showing compassion and love for others, we set an example to follow. That example shines light into dark corners and illuminates everything in and around them. I believe that people can learn to be more compassionate, but sometimes, they turn away from what they know is right and instead, embrace what is wrong.

My Dad is unable to make any of his needs known. Although we speak for Dad now, our voices are not always heard. We can only hope and pray that those caring for him make the right choices—choices motivated by common sense, compassion, and the Golden Rule.

The post Why Do People Refuse to Use Their Brains? first appeared on Nursinghomeology.