6 Signs Your Senior Loved One Needs Help at Home

As our loved ones grow older, we must be more vigilant to ensure they continue living comfortably, happily, healthily, and safely in their homes. This is especially true because it can be challenging for our senior loved ones to admit that they need help. And for us, a senior’s friends and family, it can be challenging to see the signs that they need additional support to maintain their health, happiness and independence.

The Foothills Home Services team provides a range of personalized home care services for seniors in Calgary and the Foothills area. Our care process begins with a professional assessment to determine a senior’s care needs. Having provided private home care to seniors for over 20 years, our team is familiar with the signs a senior needs more support around the home to maintain their well-being.

Here are six signs that your senior loved one may need help at home, and some of the ways that our senior home care services in Calgary can help.

1. Decline in personal care and grooming habits

A decline in your senior loved one’s personal hygiene can indicate a mental or physical health shift. The signs they might be struggling to take care of themselves include:

• Staying in the same outfit for days at a time

• Wearing soiled clothes

• Not showering or brushing their teeth frequently enough

• Having untrimmed nails or unkempt hair

• Dressing inappropriately for the weather

Through our elderly personal care and senior support services, our professional caregivers can help your senior loved one with tasks related to personal care, like using the washroom, bathing, getting dressed, and more.

2. Their home isn’t adequately maintained

Your senior loved one may be unable to maintain their home for several reasons. Maybe they forget to put things away in their usual storage spaces. Decreased mobility may mean that household chores pose too much of a physical challenge; it might even be that your senior loved one is too tired to work on household chores.

Because their home is an environment that they see every day, it may be hard for your senior loved one to notice that the clutter around their house is piling up and their home’s cleanliness isn’t what it should be.

If you visit your senior loved one’s home and can see that things are messier than usual, they may benefit from additional support around the house. 

Foothills Home Services offers senior housekeeping and homemaking services that provide seniors with support around the house on a schedule that works for them so that they can continue to live in a clean and organized environment.

3. Your senior loved one is having memory problems

How is your senior loved one keeping track of their medication? Have you noticed them forgetting to take their medication at the appropriate time, or perhaps messing up the dosage?

This can affect their health and potentially lead to complications down the road. Your senior loved one may benefit from a health care aide who can ensure they take their medicine as prescribed by their doctor or instructed by their pharmacist.

If your senior loved one is missing necessary appointments, not keeping up with their bills, or becoming increasingly forgetful, they may benefit from additional support from a caregiver.

But while brief lapses in memory or attention like forgetting a name or misplacing your keys isn’t usually a cause for concern, incidences like forgetting the stove is on and regularly burning food or getting lost in familiar places could be signs of a more significant problem that a professional can assess and recommend a course of treatment for.

4. Their appearance has changed

Has your senior loved one lost a lot of weight? They may be having difficulty shopping for groceries, deciding what to cook, preparing meals, and then actually eating. Sometimes, just warming up a meal in the microwave can be overwhelming.

To preserve your loved one’s health, they must maintain a healthy diet and receive good nutrition. Significant weight loss or weight gain can indicate that your senior loved one would benefit from support at home, particularly around the kitchen. This is also something that our caregivers can provide through our home care services, such as our senior housekeeping and homemaking service.

 5. Your senior loved one is behaving differently

Mood changes can help you spot if your loved one needs extra help at home.  Are they disinterested in food? Have their eating habits changed? Perhaps your senior loved one has stopped showing interest in hobbies they once enjoyed.

These can be signs of depression, which is a condition that isn’t uncommon in aging adults and can indicate your loved one may benefit from the additional support provided through professional home care services.

While unintended weight gain or weight loss can indicate a poor diet, they can also be related to mobility problems and a range of health conditions such as dementia and depression. 

The Foothills Home Services team can construct a personalized care plan addressing your senior loved one’s needs, and provide an experience, qualified caregiver to help your loved one navigate these challenges and preserve their health.

6. Compromised movement and bruises, cuts, or scrapes on your senior loved one

In addition to weight changes (described above), there are a few other physical signs that your senior loved one needs support at home that you can watch for. 

We can’t move around in our golden years the same way that we did in our youth. However, a senior sitting in the same spot for hours at a time, experiencing pain when they get up or struggling to go up and down the stairs, may indicate a medical problem worth paying attention to.

If you start seeing bruises, cuts, or scrapes on your senior loved one, they may have had an incident such as a fall.

Determine what caused your senior loved one’s injuries and take precautions to prevent future falls and accidents. Our professional caregivers can help your senior loved one move around and also increase their safety in their home by addressing fall hazards.

Foothills Home Services can help!

If you’ve seen any of the signs above from your senior loved one, it may be worth considering senior home care services. Contact the Foothills Home Services team, and we’ll help you determine your loved one’s care needs and provide you with the information and support you need to ensure your loved one is safe, comfortable, and happy in their home.