7 Reasons to Choose In-Home Care vs a Nursing Home

Making choices about how best to care for an aging loved one is never easy. Many factors must be taken into account, including your loved one’s financial situation, medical condition, the availability of family, and much more. When you’re facing one of these conversations, there will probably be at least one person at the table whose top priority is finding a way to provide in-home care, and that person probably has a lot of agreement with that viewpoint. The question always is, can it be done?

Thanks to the availability of in-home care services, in many cases the answer to that question is yes. Today, it’s easier than ever to keep your loved one at home instead of opting for a nursing home. Here are seven reasons why your loved one would benefit from at-home registered nursing care in Hollister CA compared to moving into a residential care facility.

Nursing homes and assisted living facilities work very hard to make their residents feel at home, and they often do an excellent job. Despite their best efforts, though, there’s truly no place like home. As we age, we become more and more attached to our familiar surroundings, making it all the more disruptive to be moved out of the home.

The impact is even greater for seniors dealing with dementia. They need a consistent environment and routine to keep from having such severe feelings of disorientation and confusion. When dementia and Alzheimer’s patients are able to stay at home, their quality of life is dramatically better.

No two seniors are alike, and no two seniors have the same need for health care. One may have reduced mobility while remaining otherwise healthy. Another might have a complex medication regimen but no impediments to movement. In a nursing home, the high patient load and short staffing can create a one-size-fits-all care plan for your loved one that just doesn’t meet their needs.

With in-home care, it is easy to customize care and give your loved one everything that’s necessary and nothing that’s not. Visiting nurses get to know their patients on a personal basis, and they provide care accordingly.

Every family’s goal is to get the best possible living arrangements for aging loved ones, but at some point, there are financial questions to answer based on the type of care the senior needs and on the savings, insurance, and other financial resources he or she has access to. The result is a very delicate balancing act that doesn’t sacrifice needed care just to reduce cost.

With in-home care, the overhead is dramatically lower than in a nursing home because there are no charges for things the senior doesn’t need. For example, if your loved one can still prepare his or her own meals, there won’t be costs associated with operating a cafeteria. In-home care fills the gaps in care, providing only what patients need instead of offering (and charging for) unneeded services.

As your parents or grandparents worked and raised a family, they gladly sacrificed to provide for others. Once they reached their golden years, they aren’t being selfish to feel that they deserve to be a name instead of a number. Yet nursing home care often takes away their identity and relegates them to being “Room 202, Bed 1.

In-home care preserves their individuality. Visiting nurses get to know their patients on an personal basis instead of dashing in briefly before moving on to the next room. Your loved one gets undivided attention during the visit, sustaining their sense of self-worth and supporting their mental and emotional health.

Contagious diseases thrive in environments where dozens of people live in close proximity breathing the same air, touching the same door knobs, and being cared for by the same staff. COVID is just the most recent example of how dangerous it is to have too many people living in a small space.

With in-home care, your loved one is isolated from people who may have transmissible diseases. The visiting nurse follows all sanitizing protocols before and after arriving at each home, cutting off the path of transmission. The result is a much lower risk of your loved one being exposed to germs.

In a nursing home, your loved one may share a bathroom and even a bedroom with another person, probably a complete stranger. This destroys medical privacy and personal dignity, and it can even be a threat to your loved one’s personal safety and to the security of his or her belongings.

By staying at home and receiving care from visiting nurses, your loved one does not have to grant access to anyone he or she does not feel comfortable having inside the home. The only new faces entering the private space of the home are the trained, vetted nurses providing in-home care. This will give your loved one the peace of mind that is so often denied to them.

Once your loved one moves into a nursing home, he or she can begin to drift toward a bedridden life despite being too healthy to be in that condition. Taking away the things that define their independence discourages their efforts to maintain that independence.

If Mom can still do her own grocery shopping, why have someone else do it? If Dad still enjoys woodworking, why take that away from him? In-home care lets you give your loved one only the things they need to be safe and healthy instead of leaving them totally dependent on others. The benefit to their health is immeasurable.

We all experience some changes in our lives if we are fortunate enough to reach our golden years. The good news is that those changes don’t have to be as drastic as they once were, or even as drastic as you think they have to be. Seniors today can stay at home without sacrificing their health or their safety.