One of the most important ways for your senior to remain safe in her home is to remain as mobile as she can. Challenges to her mobility make it more difficult for her to be as safe as possible. If your elderly family member has experienced changes to her mobility, it’s important to understand what she can do to preserve her ability to stay as mobile as she can.
Using Assistive Devices
Assistive devices might be something your senior has a love/hate relationship with on a consistent basis. Using walkers, canes, and other assistive tools can help her to feel safer, but they can also be complicated for her to use or make her feel infirm. It can help a great deal to make these tools as easy as possible for her to use and to encourage her to remember them.
Transferring Safely
Safe transfers are crucial and tricky to learn. Working with senior home care providers can ensure that you learn the best techniques to help your elderly family member to get in and out of bed or her favorite chair safely. Elder care providers can also help you to understand other ways that your senior needs help in order to be safely mobile in her home.
Walking
Even if your senior doesn’t use an assistive device to walk, how well is she able to get around? It’s important to pay attention to changes in her gait and in her ability to safely walk. This can point to increasing health issues, but it can also point to changes that she’s experiencing which you and her doctor can help her to manage.
Getting Elsewhere
But mobility is even bigger, too. It’s important that you consider your senior’s ability to drive as part of her overall mobility assessment. If driving has gotten difficult or is flat-out unsafe for her to do, it’s vital to have a solution in place for her. Senior home care providers can ensure that your elderly family member is able to get where she needs and wants to go, instead of being stuck at home. This is vital for your senior’s physical health, but also for her mental and emotional health, too.
There are so many levels of mobility for your elderly family member and they all need to remain as safe as possible for her. Keeping her safe means looking at all of the various factors and trying to be proactive with solutions.