Coordinating medical support for your loved one can be a difficult experience. Especially as many can’t do it for themselves
Coordinating medical support for your loved one can be a difficult experience. Especially as many can’t do it for themselves.
Combining advice from numerous health professionals and considering domestic needs requires patience, dedication and experience.
By using a live-in care provider, your loved one can receive consistent, comprehensive medical support in their own home. This results in more effective condition management, which can improve health outcomes and alleviate stress.
Here’s an overview of what defines coordinated care, and how live-in care can help your loved one achieve this while staying in the home environment:
What is coordinated medical support?
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality defines care coordination as: “[Ensuring] patient’s needs and preferences are known and communicated at the right time to the right people, and that this information is used to guide the delivery of safe, appropriate, and effective care.”
The primary aims of a coordinated approach to medical support in the home include:
- Unifying an often-disjointed healthcare process
- Overcoming patients’ difficulty understanding or administering complex medical recommendations
- Merging medical and domestic care requirements
How live-in care can help coordinate medical support in the home
Live-in care enables medical recommendations to be carried out comprehensively within the home. A live-in care team will act as a single point of contact for healthcare professionals, and develop a care plan to meet both their medical and domestic needs.
Merging services
Live-in care takes a multidisciplinary approach to supporting people in their own home. This means working closely alongside a range of health professionals to develop a bespoke care plan that’s tailored to your loved one’s requirements.
Your live-in care team should adopt a proactive approach to communicating with:
- Doctors
- District nurses
- Occupational therapists
- Physiotherapists
- Related health and care professionals
By collating information and recommendations from all of these sources and combining it with condition-specific care experience, a live-in care team can help to make sure that all healthcare recommendations are carried out accurately.
Holistic care provision
The services your loved one requires are likely to evolve as their condition develops. Live-in carers are best placed to make sure that medical recommendations are carried out to doctors’ orders, and to adapt the care plan to meet changing care needs.
The nursing-led aspect of this process is likely to involve assistance with one or more of the following processes:
Assistance with medical equipment:
- Urethral and suprapubic catheter care
- Convene catheter management
- Stoma — ileostomy, colostomy, urostomy
- PEG (bolus and continuous)
- Oxygen therapy
- Colostomy support
Help administering medications:
- Nebulisers
- Inhalers
- Tablets and liquid medications
- Eye drops, creams and patches
Ongoing monitoring and care support:
- Diabetes blood sugar monitoring
- Continence care
- Monitoring of vital signs and identifying signs of infection
- Pressure care and wound monitoring
Your loved one will also receive support in carrying out domestic activities around the home. This can help to alleviate stress and reduce risk factors that could exacerbate their condition further. With live-in care, your loved one can receive assistance with:
- Cooking
- Cleaning
- Personal hygiene
- Shopping
- Socialising
Through better coordination of medical recommendations, and support with both medical and domestic activities, live-in care can coordinate all elements of your loved one’s care need. This approach makes the whole process simpler, and can help to enhance your loved one’s overall quality of life.
The Good Care Group can help coordinate medical support for your loved one in their own home. Speak to our friendly team if you’d like to find out more.
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