Sometimes it is inevitable that you or someone you know requires medical care, but not everyone has the luxury of spending days counting the number of cracks in the ceiling while stranded in a hospital bed.
There are times when we need to compensate a shorter hospital stay with supplementary (actually necessary) home care. Other times the situation is more long-term, when busy family members and friends simply cannot keep sending a needy person to a hospital.
Everyone suffers under this cumbersome arrangement. Such cases call for in-home supportive services.
It sounds harsh, but this is the reality of life: it moves on even as it crawls to a near-standstill for those who have little to do except wait for care.
But enlisting the help of in-home supportive services isn’t as simple as just thinking you’d use the service. As the word ‘services’ implies, there are several types of in-home supportive services, all of them catering to a slightly different need.
It is not the same as custodial care or non-medical care, which do not require the use of licensed personnel – so don’t go hiring some amah or young woman from an agency who doesn’t employ licensed staff for a person with special needs. You might save some money, but their possible ignorance about the person’s special needs will do more harm than good in the long run.
So what types of in-home supportive services are there, and how do you know which one is the one for you? Let’s compare some of them.
- Home Health Aide
A home health aide is a person who helps the patient with daily tasks, such as changing clothes, taking a bath, preparing meals and even some housekeeping, depending on the situation.
If the aide is caring for an injured person, then they (for the sake of neutrality a gender-neutral noun shall henceforth be used) are also responsible for the disinfection of the wounds and the application of fresh bandages.
Each patient’s needs are different, so a care plan will be written up to best address those needs. If the aide is caring for an injured person, then their job will include disinfecting the wounds, reapplying bandages, sponge bathing (if necessary), and perhaps preparing meals if the patient lives alone.
- Senior Care Giver
Less and less people can find enough time to spend with their elderly as their personal lives and families steal away large chunks of their days.
Yet they cannot bring themselves to send their parents – or grandparents – to an old folks’ home (whether it is due to filial piety or otherwise is a different question entirely). When the situation boils down to this, they can consider employing a senior care giver.
In-home supportive services are important, and choosing the right senior care giver is especially important. They won’t be dealing with injured people or people with disabilities, but with senior citizens who need special care due to their age.
Negligence or sheer ignorance can cause damage that might be irreversible because of their slowed metabolism and recovery rates. A senior care giver is almost like a home health aide, except that they focus on caring for the elderly.
- Physical Therapy
A physical therapist focuses on evaluating and diagnosing any dysfunctions in a person’s movements. Sometimes they also try to treat the injuries directly where possible.
In essence, a physical therapist both diagnoses and treats patients; they look at the sources of a person’s physical injuries, namely injured tissues and bones.
They have intimate knowledge about human anatomy and the musculoskeletal system. The resulting combination means that a physical therapist can usually masterfully detect and treat musculoskeletal injuries, even more so than a general medical practitioner.
The job scope of a physical therapist can overlap with that of an occupational therapist, which will be discussed later – but bear in mind that they are two different services.
- Occupational Therapy
This in-home supportive service has nothing to do with the patient’s job – although it does provide the service provider one.
Occupational therapy involves adapting a patient to daily activities while working around their new (or existing) physical, mental, and emotional limitations.
This therapy can be conducted for both hereditary and inflicted injuries, such as a lost eye or hereditary spastic paraplegia.
An occupational therapist helps a patient gain (or regain) basic, if not advanced, motor functions, and improve cognitive skills.
Sometimes, as is the case with a person who had been in an accident that permanently changed their life, an occupational therapist holds the task of accommodating the new injury when the patient goes about doing basic daily activities.
A lot has to change when you lose a single thumb; imagine losing an entire leg or hand, or even your eye!
Like physical therapists, occupational therapists also deal with physical injuries, but where physical therapists aid the recovery of movement and strength, occupational therapists help patients learn to live their lives as normally as possible with the help of adaptive equipment and the like.
Physical therapists seldom do on-site evaluations while occupational therapists do so.
However, it must be reemphasised that the job scopes of physical therapists and occupational therapists overlap (and so do the things they do), so the distinction between the two can blur.
- Registered Dietician
A dietician deals with your food intake – the calories and the nutrition both.
You can enlist the services of one to craft a diet plan for your family, or you can get one to advise you on a wholesome meal plan for someone freshly out of hospital, who will need special foods to recuperate.
A home health aide can help to prepare meals, but a registered dietician is the person who really knows what is good for you when it comes to what and how much to eat.
A dietician does not deal with physical, mental or emotional impairment, although the foods they recommend can help combat them some.
If you think that the meal plan they concoct will be bland and taste nasty, think again. Dieticians are trained to think up meals that are wholesome, not calorie-heavy, and healthy without sacrificing the delight of flavour.
You might not even miss that steak or pork once you’ve adapted to the change in menu.
Don’t pin your hopes up too high about having chocolates on the menu often, though.
There are many more in-home supportive services, and as aforementioned, each of them is tailored to fit a different need, be it physical, mental, emotional or even developmental. Shop around and see if there is one that fits your bill; chances are you’ll find it.
No related posts.