Home is considered the safest place for many people, but there are a lot of things that homeowners need to do in order for it to provide the best safety and protection for their family, especially for those that are much older than them. For seniors, they would often need special protection even inside the home, as they are frailer and would typically need more care than anyone.
So, if you are living with or caregiving a senior family member, you should adjust or improve several aspects of your home in order for the senior to be safer. Here are tips on making your home safe and comfortable for seniors.
Create a Senior Healthcare Plan
The best gift that you can give to a senior family member is a senior healthcare plan, which would include programs that will allow the family member to have a more comfortable time or experience at home.
The programs may include senior care assistants or companions that will assist and help the senior family member in various tasks inside the house. You can learn more about senior assistance on the website of Spectrum Health Care. Providing home care services for seniors will ensure that they wouldn’t have difficulties in accomplishing tasks, and the family members would also have peace of mind that their senior member is living a comfortable life with assistance.
Provide Gadgets and Tools Made for Seniors
If you have the budget, you should provide seniors with gadgets and tools that would make it much easier for them to walk or move around the house. One of the most popular types of gadgets or machinery that you should have when there is a senior at home is the stairlift, which basically acts as an elevator for seniors to ride on if they want to go from one floor to another. Climbing the stairs can be a difficult task for many senior citizens, so providing them with a stairlift will help them go up and down floors with ease and comfort.
In addition to stairlifts, you should also have security cameras and alarms at home so that you will be notified if the senior is moving at night or if they need assistance in the bedroom or bathroom. The alarms can be set at the door of the senior’s bedroom, or they can actually be placed under the bed or pillow.
Make the Various Rooms of the Home Safer
Besides gadgets and tools, you should also make an effort to transform the rooms of your home to be much safer for your senior family member. To make the rooms safer, you should set the pieces of furniture in a way that would allow the elderly to have plenty of space to walk or move in the room. So, the rooms should be spacious but would still have chairs or other pieces of furniture that the elderly can rest on. You can find furniture suitable for seniors at https://www.sunpan.com/furniture at a reasonable price.
Moreover, you should also inspect the floors of your home and see if the tiles or the floor itself is slippery. If they are, you should have carpets or rugs placed in big areas of the floor so that they can provide traction and cushion for the elderly. If there are rough edges on the rugs or carpets, you can install anti-slip tapes on them so that the edges would be flatter or more even.
Improve the Lights of the House
It is common for the elderly to have poor eyesight, so you should improve the lights of the house so that they will be able to see much better in various rooms. You would need to make sure that all the rooms and areas in the house are properly lit, and you should also install more lights on high-risk areas like stairs and hallways.
These are a few of the best methods that you can follow if you want to make the home much safer and more comfortable for a senior family member. If you plan to go on an outdoor trip with the elderly, you should also install a car lift so that the senior citizen can safely go inside your vehicle. But, you may need to upgrade the engine and internal parts of your car to accommodate the added weight of the car lift. You can learn more about it on various websites that tell you what parts you need to have to make the vehicle stronger.