Living with chronic pain affects all aspects of a person’s life. From personal hygiene to sleeping issues, chronic pain can make a person’s life difficult to say the least. If you are running a care home, it is important that your caregiving staff are trained to help the elderly residents manage their pain. Over here we discuss some of the ways your care home staff can help the residents as partners in their pain management:
- Watch their diet: What a resident eats can affect their efforts to manage chronic pain. Eating certain anti-inflammatory foods like spinach, kale, and collards and nuts like almonds and walnuts can help reduce inflammation. The staff must ensure that inflammation-fighting foods are part of the daily diet of those suffering from joint pain and inflammatory problems.
- Keep them physically active: Depending upon the type of pain the resident has, the staff can introduce low-impact physical exercises. Simple stretching exercises, yoga, swimming and other exercises can help manage chronic pain naturally. Regular exercise keeps muscles and joints limber and strong. Also, they can create an individualised exercise programme to suit the individual needs of the residents.
- Help manage stress: Stress and chronic pain are closely linked. When a person is under stress, the brain and nervous system are in an overdrive mode which causes muscles to tense up. You can address these issues by organising yoga, meditation and breathing exercises in your care home.
- Help them kick bad habits: When someone is in persistent pain, it’s easy to turn to negative behaviours like smoking and overconsumption of alcohol. However, these behaviours increase pain and cause trouble in sleeping. If the residents in your care home are trying to cope with pain with negative behaviours, you can arrange counselling for them so that they look for healthier ways to manage their pain.
By automating certain processes in your care home, you can help your caregiving staff give personal attention to each and every resident. For instance, caregivers spend a lot of time in manually reviewing MAR sheets and updating medical records. With eMAR you can streamline the medication administration and bring in operational efficiency in your care home. With eMAR, your caregiving staff will no longer have to spend time on the tedious work like filling in paper-based MAR sheets manually, thus giving them time to engage in meaningful activities. Know more about the benefits of implementing eMAR in your care home.
