Going to a nursing home when you grow older is NOT inevitable, especially with nowadays health care.
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To avoid going to a nursing home, set up a team of people around you. This can be structured very traditionally, or you can get very creative with it. For instance, we have a client who basically has people who just come in and help out in their home. They schedule them just basically around the clock and that way they always have young, physically active people around that know them really well, people with whom they’ve built a relationship.
It’s not necessarily caregivers; they’re helping with the cooking and the cleaning and all of this. They take care of the home, but they’re also there to help out our client and his wife as well. They’ve built in this kind of 24/7 coverage where they’re taken care of, and they don’t necessarily have to hire out traditional caregivers as the Health Care System might traditionally think of them.
So, you can get very creative like that and understand that there are a lot of things that are well set up already. So for instance, your medical team – who is that? Of course, you have your primary care doctor who should be involved in what you’re doing, but also, what are the other specialists, or who are the other specialists that you see as well for any conditions that you may have? You also may want rehab professionals around you. So, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy depending on what your needs are, or at least well connected to a good rehab team.
If you’re getting to the point where you’re thinking about going into or worrying about going into a nursing home, you likely may have had physical therapy or occupational therapy already by this point. So, what are the good places that you’ve gone to that you enjoyed and got great care and service versus the places that you did not find as beneficial?
Start looking and researching in advance. Try to find a rehab team that you’ll be able to go to on a moment’s notice if something happens. If you have a fall, if you go out to the hospital and need to get discharged, if you do end up in a facility temporarily and then you need a rehab team when you get home, who might that team be?
We’ll talk about this more when we talk about the actual just taking care of your physical body, but having that rehab team around you can be very, very important. Especially, you’ll need them on a moment’s notice because you don’t know when you’re going to need them.
We see all the time where people will fall or something will happen and then they do need that rehab professional around them as quickly as possible. But then they’re searching. So, if you have that set up already, that can be extremely beneficial.
