Home Health Care And It’s Benefits

The number one reason for needing home health care is when care of an elderly person becomes too much for family members to bear alone. Home health care is especially true with those patients that need special care due to illness. Alzheimer's disease is a tragic slow deterioration of the mental faculties. With Alzheimer's disease people often lose the ability to care for themselves. This condition quickly overwhelms family members and they turn to help. Home health care especially for the elderly is one of the answers to this problem.

A home health care nurse can help with daily monitoring of these types of patients. Often a patient of Alzheimer's disease will tend to wander and get lost. Home health care nurses are able to be an extra pair of eyes in this event. Most of the times elderly patients do not want to live in nursing homes or retirement communities. This is another reason for home health care for the people. It gives the patients a sense of self to know they can stay in their home instead of the nursing homes. It is common for these kinds of patients to have living wills and instructions for their final times. Home health care nurses are often saddled with the responsibility of making these difficult decisions when the time comes. From that moment on the nurses stay in the home full time until the death occurs.

Aside from physical care, home health care for the patients can provide emotional support for the entire family. This is a trying time for all involved and it is not unusual for it to be the first experience with death for many people. More over the fact is that, it is a parent and the family is often grieving before the actual death. Home health care nurses have been trained in grief counseling and emotional support. They are by no means professionals in that field but they certainly understand how to handle the patients going through these tough times. The home health care nurses often get emotionally involved in their patients as well, so they mourn the passing with the family.

Home health care for the elderly has no certain time limit; usually the nurses are called in for the last weeks or months of the patient's life. Sometimes this assignment can last for years and then nobody can definitely pinpoint how long a disease will last or when someone's time is up. This is why commitment is extremely important. People who can not handle it are weeded out quickly, leaving only the best in the field. Families depend on their home health care nurse for guidance and support. In cases of non lethal injuries, patient recovery is a great advantage of home health care. Studies show that people recover quicker in their own homes around the people they love and need, than in a hospital setting. They are able to see their families and interact, getting the necessary mental support for recovery. Hospitals may have the best medical teams but they all are still impersonal and spread thin. Home health care provides the perfect combination of hospital knowledge and family support. Home health care nurses are able to help with physical therapy and recovery on a more specific level; they are well in tuned to the progress and needs of the patients.

• John Palsson
• 04/12/2008, 10:59 AM
• 0 Comments