Innovative Home Care: Using Photographs to Enhance Your Care for Seniors with Dementia

Home Care in Hampton Bays NY

Finding out that your elderly loved one has dementia can be overwhelming, but it does not have to mean that she cannot continue to live an active, engaged, and enjoyable lifestyle as she progresses through her disease. Modifying her lifestyle and finding ways to adapt to her specific cognitive challenges and limitations helps to encourage her to stay happy and healthy while also maintaining as much independence as possible. Establishing a home care relationship can help her with this.

Starting a home care relationship for your aging loved one is a great way to allow her to age in place with the surroundings that make her comfortable and happy, and to feel confident she is getting the level of care and assistance she needs and deserves on an ongoing basis. This is especially helpful for a senior with dementia, as having structured, consistent care helps to create a sense of predictability and security within their care routine. This in home health care services provider can also be a valuable resource for providing physical and cognitive care and assistance when you are not available to be in the home with her at all times.

One way that a home care provider can enhance care for your aging loved one with dementia and encourage more active, engaged, and independent living is by using photographs. This simple technique can help to ease anxiety, promote greater safety in the home, and help your parent involve herself in more of her care tasks so she feels more engaged and keeps her mind active to promote better cognitive health and strength throughout the progression of the disease.

Share these ideas with your parent’s in home health care services provider to use photographs to enhance her care routine:

• Photo instructions. Everyone has seen instruction manuals that do not contain any works but seek to guide you through the steps of a process with pictures alone. Mimic this by taking pictures of each step of common activities and post them in a readily visible area so that your parent can use them to help her through handling tasks throughout her home such as doing a load of laundry, loading the dishwasher, folding laundry, or even feeding her pets. You can even put these pictures in a binder or album and have her reference them as needed.

• Family connections. Help her to remember her family members, friends, neighbors, and members of her care team with pictures. Take a picture of individual people and show it to her, giving her an explanation of who the person is, that person’s name, and the connection that that person has with your loved one.

• Memory skills. Turn working on your parent’s memory skills a game by bringing out photos of vacations or events, jumbling them up, and having your parent put them in sequence to show the order of events when the pictures occurred. This works their cognitive processing and critical thinking skills, as well as boosting their memory and enhancing their emotional health by reminiscing about the experience.

If you or an aging loved one are considering hiring professional home care in Hampton Bays, NY, call the caring staff at Artful Home Care today at 631-685-5001.