Latest News from Everycare

August 5th, 2021

How to tell if an elderly person needs a bit of extra help.

When it comes to deciding whether your parents, elderly friend or relative needs additional help to ensure they can live safely in their own home, it can be tricky to know where to start. The wheres, whens and hows of the situation are not simple. It can easily start to feel overwhelming as you try to get to grips with all the options available, the costs, and what is best for the elderly person themselves.

8 tips for deciding if an elderly person needs some extra support.

• Assess the person’s needs – This can feel quite difficult. Do you ask the person, observe them, ask other people who know them, or something else? You may not know what your parent, relative or friend requires, or what is available. We can help you organise your thoughts. You can fill in our and use your answers to establish what level and kind of support is needed. It’s a handy starting point for everyone involved.

Does your parent, relative or friend have:

• Family support – are there family or friends living locally and are they available to help?
• A safe home environment – is their home as safe as it can be? What barriers restrict their ability to stay in their own home? For example dangerous steps or staircases, a large garden, or badly maintained security?
• Medical needs – does your parent, relative or friend have increasing medical needs that they can’t manage on their own? Is the person taking their medication as per prescription? Do they need assistance?
• Good cognitive health – Can they clearly think, learn and remember, able to carry out everyday activities safely?
• Mobility – are they able to safely move around their home and ideally to local shops, GP surgeries and to see friends and relatives?
• Personal hygiene – Can they wash themselves and keep themselves clean? Do you think they are struggling with using the bath or shower on their own?
• How much support are they already getting around the above, and how much help do they realistically need to stay safe and healthy?
If your mum can’t see that well and lives in a rural area on her own, her needs will be very different from someone else’s healthy dad, who lives in a flat in the city surrounded by relatives but is starting to become frail and can’t get to the shops.
• Don’t forget – the person in need of care is still a person!

It’s vital that you involve the person themselves in the process from end to end, as a partner in it. Just because they’re getting on it doesn’t mean they’ve lost their pride, their love of independence, their unique personality. Nobody wants to lose control of their life, and that means sensitivity and positivity are both essential. Together you’ll find a clear way through any potential resistance faster and more easily.

July 5th, 2021

Nearly 9 million older people feel less confident attending hospital appointments now than before the pandemic

With fifty four per cent of over 60s feeling less confident attending a hospital appointment and almost six million feeling less confident going to a GP surgery than before the pandemic, Age UK worries how many people can “bounce back” from Covid-19.

Age UK says the impact of the pandemic on the health and wellbeing of some older people in early 2021 is so demonstrably severe it has left “deep physical and emotional scars” on the older population. The adverse effect may prove long lasting in many cases, or even irreversible, with big implications for the NHS and social care in the months and years to come.

Age UK who carried out the research during January and February 2021 also found nearly four and a half million people over 60 said they couldn’t walk as far with around four million people reported they were living in more physical pain.

For the full story visit the homecare.co.uk website

June 18th, 2021

COVID-19 vaccination likely to be mandatory 

Home care and nurses recruitment
The government have announced their intention to make Covid-19 vaccinations mandatory for those working in care homes from the autumn.
There is currently a review of how to deal with care workers in the NHS and also in community settings with the requirement likely to be extended to these groups at either the same time or following closely on.
At Everycare we are pleased that all our home care staff who qualify for their vaccines have already had at least their first jab with the majority having had their second along with all our office staff.
June 16th, 2021

Autistic people find it harder to tell when someone is angry from a facial expression

Contact UsPeople with autism are less able to accurately identify anger from a person’s facial expression, according to new research.

The study by the University of Birmingham also found that for people with the related disorder of alexithymia, all facial expressions appear to be more intensely emotional.

The question of how people with autism recognise and relate to emotional expression has been discussed by scientists for over three decades. But it is only in the past 10 years that the relationship between autism and alexithymia has been explored.

This new study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, uses new techniques to look at how autism and alexithymia affects a person’s ability to accurately gauge the emotions suggested by different facial expressions.

Connor Keating, a PhD researcher in the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology and Centre for Human Brain Health, is lead author of the study. He says: “We identified that autistic people had a specific difficulty recognising anger which we are starting to think may relate to differences in the way autistic and non-autistic people produce these expressions.

To read the full story visit the homecare.co.uk website.

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