What are the daily care items for the elderly?

In fact, there is no nationally unified list of standardized projects. The core is to tailor the project based on the elderly's self-care ability and basic health status. The overall content will be matched around basic physiological care, chronic disease management, mental and psychological support, and accident risk prevention and control.

I have been working as a caregiver in a community elderly care service station for almost 7 years. I have encountered too many family members who come up and ask for the "universal care form". If they are given, they cannot use it. Take the two elderly people who live alone in our station. The 73-year-old Aunt Chen can dance square dances and go to the vegetable market. She is completely self-care. Her daily care does not need to be complicated at all. We come to her home once a week to check her blood pressure and blood sugar, clean the windows and clean the kitchen with heavy oil stains. We usually call to ask if she has minor discomforts such as dizziness and chest tightness. Occasionally, it is enough to accompany her to the community hospital to get common medicines.

If you encounter a semi-disabled or disabled elderly person, the content will be much more detailed. For example, Uncle Li from the same community fell down and fractured his hip last year and was bedridden. Daily care required him to turn over every two hours, pat his back to expel phlegm to prevent bedsores, raise his upper body when feeding, feed slowly and swallow slowly to prevent him from choking and coughing, and help him move his leg muscles every day to prevent atrophy. He took medicines to reduce blood pressure and calcium supplements at mealtimes and watch him take them. Occasionally, he had to help him use Kesel to defecate. These are all essential items.

There is still a controversial contention in the industry, which is whether cognitive training for elderly people with cognitive deterioration counts as necessary daily care. Some family members think it’s normal for people to become confused when they get old, so they read newspapers and play puzzle games with them every day just to torment them. ； There are also family members who insist on doing it, saying that their elderly family members have persisted for more than half a year, and the frequency of forgetting things has indeed been reduced a lot. The experience of our station is that there is no absolute right or wrong in this matter. It mainly depends on the acceptance of the elderly. If the elderly thinks that playing simple puzzles and reading old newspapers is interesting, then do it. If he is particularly resistant and becomes emotional and cannot eat or sleep well, then there is no need to force it.

Many people think that daily care only focuses on eating, drinking, taking medicine, and taking medicine. In fact, mental care is the most easily missed. In the past two months, we conducted door-to-door follow-up visits. There was an 81-year-old Grandma Wang whose physical parameters were normal. She always told her children that she was in pain all over her body. She went to a large hospital several times to check up and found no organic problems. Later, after chatting with our social worker for a long time, she told the truth that her children had not come to see her for two months. She deliberately said she was not feeling well and wanted her to come back more often. At this time, no matter how much nutrition you buy her or how much body care you give her, it will be useless. Spending two hours a week to chat with her about the neighborhood is more effective than any panacea.

There are also some seemingly irrelevant trivial matters that actually fall into the category of daily care, such as checking every month whether the handrails at home are loose, whether the anti-slip mats have shifted, whether the hot water bottle is placed where the elderly can reach it without knocking it over, and whether the soles of the elderly's shoes are smooth and slippery. These trivial things may seem inconspicuous, but they can really avoid a lot of big troubles - after all, an elderly person may fall and suffer a fracture or be bedridden, and his physical condition can easily collapse.

To put it bluntly, there is really no fixed standard answer to the daily care of the elderly. The core is to take the actual needs of the elderly into consideration, which is much more effective than superficially applying the standard list on the Internet.