Personal Care at Home in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea
Getting into the shower, getting dressed, getting to the lavatory — the work families find hardest to keep doing, and the work a changing face makes worst.
The job that strains a relationship
A son can cook. A daughter can drive to the pharmacy. What almost nobody sustains indefinitely is showering a parent, and the strain rarely surfaces as a complaint about the task. It surfaces as two people who have stopped talking easily.
Handing it over usually mends something. A daughter can be a daughter again, and the awkward twenty minutes belongs to somebody who is paid to be there.
It only works if it is the same person. Being undressed in front of a stranger is bearable once. It is not bearable as a standing arrangement with whoever the agency had spare.
Personal care is normally bought as one short visit each morning rather than a long one, and twenty-five to forty minutes covers most households at the point they first ring.
It lengthens later, when breakfast and the kitchen start folding into the same visit.
What the visit contains
Hands-on work, paced by the person in the room and not by the appointment book.
A shower, a bath or a seated wash
Whichever is safe on the day, in a room warmed through with everything already laid out.
Dressing, at their choosing
They pick, it is laid out, and help arrives only at the fastenings that have become fiddly.
Lavatory and continence
Matter-of-fact and unhurried, wrapped in enough routine that it stops being an event.
Skin, nails, hair and teeth
Dealt with while somebody is already undressed, the one moment anything wrong is visible.
Transfers that spare two backs
Bed, chair and bathroom, lifted properly rather than pulled up by an arm.
Noted before leaving
Better or worse than last week, and anything on the skin that wants watching.
Beyond the scope here
- Procedures that belong to a nurse
- Looking after a wound of any sort
- Tablets and liquids, in every form
- Exercise regimes written by a therapist
- Lifting that honestly needs two people, or equipment nobody arranged in advance
- Whatever is turned down on the morning
One person, every week
For this service above every other, continuity is not a preference. It is what makes it bearable at all.
Ask which hours come back — (954) 388-1625