Home Caregivers Tips: How to Advance Home Caregivers’ Work with Personal Safety Apps

Table of contents:

• Key Challenges in Home Caregivers’ Working Day
• Top 10 Home Caregivers Tips: How to Make the Patient’s Life Safer?
• AllsWell Alert App is Here to Assist Home Caregivers

Home caregivers serve their duty 24/7 and lend a helping hand when patients need it most. Whether they should provide daily care for a bedridden patient, foster post-stroke recovery, or cope with an acute health condition – they are the #1 person you can count on.

Every nursing assistant must demonstrate resilience, treatment proficiency, and communication skills to succeed in their duties. To help with that, we’d like to offer caregivers tips to help home care assistants withstand the most common challenges – and even solve them using technology.

Key Challenges in Home Caregivers’ Working Day

Living life in the fast lane takes its toll on a home caregiver. They face both physical and emotional exhaustion due to irregular work schedules. Such ordeals eventually hurt their professional and family roles. Here are the key challenges that most home caregivers eventually have to deal with. 

Professional Indifference

With time, some home caregivers start to show indifference toward their patients. Such negligence hurts the senior care process in general. The harm worsens in sensitive cases of dementia care when the helper must consistently monitor and adjust the treatment process.

Distancing from Family Members

Strained relationships with kids and spouses overcloud the life of many hired nursing assistants. Working all day up to 8-13 hours leaves them only a little room for their loved ones. Try following our tips for a healthy parent-adult relationship to help you reconnect with your kids against the odds.

Stress Caused by Infection Risks

The COVID-19 pandemic got all of us stressed out and overwhelmed. But home caregivers had to deal with an extra burden as they took care not only of their family and friends’ health but their patients, too. A study published by The Gerontological Society of America showed that apart from generally higher anxiety and depression symptoms, long-term home caregivers struggled from “more somatic symptoms (e.g., headaches, abdominal pain).”

If you’re familiar with the strength-draining impact of caregiving stressors, you should try meditation practices. Pay attention to our advice on selecting mental health and stress release apps.

Overall Health & Quality of Life Decline

A steady decline in QOL haunts home caregivers during their careers. Firstly, nurse aides perform a physically demanding job. They can easily hurt their backs while bathing patients or turning them in their beds. Hazardous materials and potentially congestive body fluids can also provoke undesirable health harm.

Work Conflicts and Safety Risks

Incivility and disrespect, unfortunately, might take place both from the side of the care agency supervisor and from patients. However, you should be ready to stand out for your rights and demand decent workplace safety. Additionally, you may benefit from looking into workplace safety resources with helpful caregivers’ tips like RN.Com.

Top 10 Home Caregivers Tips: How to Make the Patient’s Life Safer?

Despite associated difficulties, you can still stay focused on patients’ needs. We entirely support home caregivers in their commitment to care for someone else and improve people’s lives. That’s why we’re sharing the top ten caregivers’ tips to streamline an individual healthcare routine.

Home Treatment Management

It’s essential to realize that in-home care isn’t a one-time hassle. Contracts for long-term caregiving services would require you to show endurance, professionalism, and involvement. You’ll likely succeed with the long-term care tasks if you consider the following:

1. Prioritize Mutual Trust

Start with some ice-breaking conversations to win your patient’s trust. By doing so, you’ll cheer them up even though they might disapprove of the idea of assistance from your – or anyone else’s – side. Try getting across the fact that they are about to go through rough times. But with you as their health care provider, they will reach the recovery they long for.

2. Handle Necessary Preparations Ahead

Prepare a sufficient supply of hygienic items, spare linen, and a properly stuffed med kit in advance. Even though you can feel confident about managing most in-home care tasks, there’s nothing wrong with consulting with your mentor. Since your goal is to provide quality care, you will only win from adopting tried-and-true practices.

3. Stay Alert for Emergencies

Although you might not be a live-in carer, you can still ensure an instant response to a health emergency. That’s why we include personal safety tracker use to our list of caregivers’ tips – it’s undemanding but quite helpful.

Personal well-being monitoring apps allow your dependents to call for help with a single tap on the SOS call button. Additionally, they might support background safety tracking to detect accidents automatically. For instance, AllsWell provides unobtrusive inactivity monitoring. Thanks to it, you’ll be notified if a person with chronic disease or impaired mobility shows unusual inactivity patterns.  

4. Find Qualified Guidance and Support

Whenever you start feeling guilty or helpless, considering your efforts futile, reach out to support groups. Even sophisticated specialists don’t dismiss valuable caregivers’ tips they can learn from community members.

For instance, you can check the Home Care Association of America for educational guidebooks and updates about professional events. If you primarily seek words of encouragement and want to share experiences, you may check support groups recommended by A Place for Mom.

Ensuring Outdoors Safety for Surveyed Patients 

The assistance of personal care specialists shouldn’t necessarily be the case of treatment for stay-at-home patients only. It’s also not recommended to keep your patients indoors if they can go outside. Once your dependent has regained sufficient strength and sustained well-being, it would be a good idea to let them take short walks. However, leaving them unattended doesn’t mean giving up control.

5. Arrange Safety Rules

The patient must adhere to some necessary boundaries while outside. Remind them of persisting health concerns and warning signs they should account for. For instance, you should persuade them against taking long trips on foot during summer scorchers in case of heart problems.

6. Stay Aware of Person’s Schedule

It’s essential to know where your patient usually goes and how much time they typically spend on certain activities. Thus, if you notice the usually long inactivity period that looks suspicious, you’ll know it’s time to make a call to check in with them.

7. Stay in Touch with the Patient’s Neighbors

It’s essential to stay connected with people who live next door to your patient. A caring neighbor will inform you in case something seems off. Therefore, you’ll manage to back up your dependents even if you check in with them personally only for a few minutes daily.

8. Use Personal GPS Tracker

Location tracking will tip you on a patient’s whereabouts in case some health or external hazard threatens them. For example, using AllsWell’s built-in GPS tracking feature, you will get precise geo-position of your client the moment the SOS alarm gets triggered. 

Providing Care for Mentally Ill People

Mental health home care might be quite effective. Quality care helps people fight anxiety disorders and depression with occupational and speech therapy. Continuous monitoring seriously helps home caregivers to carry out such types of individual care.

9. Daily Emotion and Attitude Tracking

Previously, we posted a comprehensive overview of mental well-being tracking apps, which you could use as a source of daily insights. If you visit a client’s home irregularly, they can still share their current symptoms through their smartphone. Thus, you’ll be able to evaluate the response to the treatment after a certain period.

10. Respond to SOS Requests Immediately

In case of a panic attack, suicidal thoughts, or simply overwhelmed state of mind, home caregivers will be ready to respond. Teach your clients to keep panic button devices or similar apps handy.

An ill person would win an extra benefit from the GPS tracking feature of an emergency SOS app. Sending out an emergency signal with the location attached can back up Alzheimer’s patients if they experience memory blackouts outside their homes. 

AllsWell Alert App is Here to Assist Home Caregivers

Forearmed with daily care tips, you can improve the quality of home care and your work-life balance even more with the help of AllsWell Alert mobile app. It’s a universal safety tracking solution you can install on your patients’ smartphones:

• Simple interface. Even non-tech-savvy seniors won’t face any difficulty when handling the app.

• All emergency contacts are in one place. Users can add as many emergency contacts as they need and send instant notifications to them all at once.

• Two ways to send SOS alerts. AllsWell offers traditional SOS buttons and background inactivity monitoring for automated prolonged inactivity alerts.

• Precise geolocation. The location data gets sent to emergency contacts alongside the alert. 

Test the full functionality of AllsWell for free within a 30-day FREE trial period. To get started, go to Google Play or AppStore and download this personal safety tracker for a trial run.