For caregivers, helping ageing residents stay healthy, happy, and strong can be sometimes challenging. However, caring for seniors with dementia can be all the more difficult as often accomplishing the simple daily routine tasks can get difficult. To help caregivers understand this better, we have rounded a few ways to help them deal with seniors suffering from dementia:
- Learn about dementia: Understand the condition better. As dementia is not a single disease but rather a collective term to describe various symptoms of cognitive decline, it is important for you to learn how dementia can affect different people differently. Knowing common symptoms and safety protocols can help you plan better and provide specialised care to residents with dementia.
- Be quick to adapt: When it comes to caring for residents with dementia, besides physical care, you must be able to help them ease their anxiety. As the behaviour of some dementia patients can be erratic, you need to stay calm and help the residents calm down. There will be unprecedented situations where you will be expected to act swiftly and decisively.
- Communicate effectively: The quality of care that you will be provided to the patients with dementia depends on how effectively you can communicate with them. Use simple sentences to make yourself clearly understood. In some cases, you may also require visual objects or gestures for better communication. Look for non-verbal cues to understand what the patients are trying to convey.
- Take care of yourself: While caring for patients with dementia, it is equally important that you take good care of yourself. Caregiving can be physically and emotionally demanding and, thus, make sure you take time off from work to focus on activities that you like doing.
It is really challenging to take care of seniors with dementia. One major challenge that caregivers face is that patients with dementia fail to remember to take their medications on time. On days when the residents display difficult behaviours, it can become for caregivers to manage them. And amidst all the chaos and confusion, occurrence of missed or delayed medication doses can happen. To avoid such medication errors, many dementia care homes in the UK are switching to eMAR. The use of eMAR provides much-needed peace of mind to caregivers, by streamlining the whole medication administration process. The caregivers may forget to administer medication but the software won’t let this happen.
If you are a care home manager and want to know more about eMAR, here is a product tour. When you implement eMAR in your care home, training and top-up training are included in the package.
