What is the daily care of the elderly?

Daily care for the elderly is essentially a continuous care service provided around the three core dimensions of physical health, psychological state, and social function of the elderly. The core goal is never to "serve people alive", but to help the elderly maintain a dignified and high-quality life as much as possible.

I have worked as a front-line nurse in a community care center for 5 years. I just adjusted the care plan for my 78-year-old Grandma Li last week. She has COPD and mild cognitive impairment. The previous caregiver only completed the basic operations of feeding, wiping herself, and regularly feeding medicine as required. She sat on the balcony every day in a daze and rarely spoke. After we adjusted, she only fixed two times a day. In addition to patting her on the back to expel phlegm and watching her take inhalants regularly, she would take 20 minutes every afternoon to look through old photo albums with her when she was young, help her sort out the old food stamps and cloth stamps in the albums, and help her downstairs to sit with her old neighbor who danced square dance for half an hour in the evening. With these two small changes, within half a month she took the initiative to make candied date rice dumplings and send them to her granddaughter in Shenzhen.

There are quite a lot of misunderstandings about this job in the outside world. Many people think that it is just "paying someone to wait on the elderly to eat, drink and defecate". As long as he is not falling or hungry, it is considered to be up to standard. Previously, there was an 82-year-old man in our center. Because his children did not come to see him for more than three months, he deliberately lost his temper and refused to eat. His family came to hold him accountable and said that we did not provide adequate care. Later, we coordinated with his children to make video calls twice a week and come back once every two months. The old man's appetite returned to normal within a few days. Of course, there are different voices in the industry. Many primary care workers feel that the current basic care fees are already low. Is it beyond the scope of their job responsibilities to require additional psychological counseling and emotional companionship? There is still no standard answer to this question. After all, the care costs that many ordinary families can afford cannot cover so many fine services. But if you have been in this industry for a long time, you will know that the "extra things" you pay more attention to are often the key to affecting the condition of the elderly.

In fact, the content of daily care is very flexible. For the elderly who are completely independent, the focus of care is to measure blood pressure and blood sugar every day, remind them to take antihypertensive medicine on time, and occasionally help them run errands, pay utility bills, and get an expert account. Last month, I helped Uncle Zhang from the center get tickets for the concert of his favorite folk singer. When the old man got the ticket, he jumped like a kid who just got candy. If you are a semi-disabled or disabled elderly person, you have to pay a lot more attention to it, such as turning every two hours to prevent bedsores, controlling the temperature and flow rate of food when feeding through the nose, and doing rehabilitation training with the elderly after a stroke. You even have to keep an eye on which leg you take first when walking.

I often tell new caregivers that this job is complex and complicated, and requires a lot of nursing knowledge and first aid skills. It is simple and simple. To put it bluntly, they are half of the elderly's family members. Don't treat them as "tasks" that need to be completed. Waiting for half a minute for them to finish the old story they have told eight times over and over again, and asking if the plaster applied yesterday is itchy is better than anything else.