National Senior Health & Fitness Day is May 27th

May 27, 2015 is National Senior Health & Fitness Day! It is so important to take care of our loved ones who are seniors. Even if they are independent, it is important to encourage them to take good care of themselves. I am the youngest grandchild on my mom’s side. I am the youngest of ten so by the time I was born my grandparents were already older than most grandparents. My Grandma Rose had heart problems for years. She had her first open heart surgery a couple years before I was even born. I remember she would always take great care of herself. She would walk around the mall all the time, if she couldn’t get to the mall, she would walk laps around her house. She also always ate a heart healthy diet, not a lot of red meat and took her medicines. She must have done something right because she went sixteen years without another open heart surgery when the normal time frame is ten years.

She ended up with Alzheimer’s disease so she was unable to care for herself in the same way as before. It was extremely hard because she was such an amazing woman. We had to make sure she got exercise and took her medicine and watch her diet for her.  No one minded though because she always took such great care of all of us.  After her Alzheimer’s progressed, it became too hard to care for her ourselves. We had to seek out help by looking for a nursing home as she needed more medical help. I come from a family of teachers, none of us are in the medical field.  Thankfully we found a great one for her to go to. It was also close by so I could go visit her all the time, we were extremely close.  I am so glad there is BestNursingHomes.com to help educate those who we trust our loved ones with. BestNursingHomes.com is run by the Association of Skilled Nursing Providers (ASNP) a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about skilled nursing care.

Here is a quote about BestNursingHomes.com:

 
 “We are very grateful for the leadership of John Sorensen in the post-acute care industry. John is a leader in his field, a generous philanthropist, and a great example of someone who places serving the patient above anything else. We are proud to be associated with John and North American Health Care and grateful for his support to promote best practices in skilled nursing.” – Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Association for Skilled Nursing Providers

You can do lots of things to get your loved ones moving and healthy:

Go for walks together, if the weather is bad, walk around a mall or even around the house.

Take them shopping with you, have them help push the cart for exercise and the cart will give them some support.

Go to parks and walk trails and have some fun on the swings.

Park a little further away to get exercise when going to the store.

There are also many activities at senior centers that they can enjoy and make some new friends.

Make sure they are going to the doctor regularly and are getting preventive tests like colonoscopies and stress tests.

Monitor medicines and make sure they have everything they need for the month

Cook together and make healthy meals that they can just heat up from the freezer. Sometimes cooking isn’t as fun when you are just cooking for one and people tend to go to fast food and other processed foods.

The most important thing is to be there and spend time with them. Family and friends being there can have an impact on how healthy you are. Remember that emotional health is also really important.

 Get them involved in clubs and groups based on their interests so they are making friends and socializing.

I know today is National Senior Health & Fitness  Day but it also reminds me to take better care of myself even though I am only 33. Time goes by so fast and if I make changes now, it will be easier as I get older.

Nursing Home Safety Precautions

I was thinking about different ways to keep people that are in nursing homes safe. There was a tragedy that happened shortly after my grandma left an assisted living home to live with us for a while. This happened a couple weeks after my grandma left, in winter a woman went outside and froze to death. It was a terrible thing to happen. I still feel really bad for the family even now, many years later. I was thinking what if nursing homes bought an id badge printer and made ID cards for the patients? There are many benefits for doing this. It would help with the high amount of turnaround with employees knowing the patient by name. It would also help when it is time for meds for the patients and making sure the right person gets the right medications.

As a granddaughter of a woman who had Alzheimer’s I think it would also help those patients remember their names as well. I think for privacy reasons it should be the first name initial on the badge. You could even go as far as putting the patients and residents names in a certain color if they didn’t have permission to leave alone for safety reasons which would be great if it is a big building. It would also help knowing who belongs there and who is just visiting.

I think it is important to have some kind of protection for the residents that a stranger couldn’t be able to walk off the streets and victimize the patients. I don’t know how many times I went to visit my grandma and I was able to walk right in the facility and wasn’t asked who I was or who I was coming to see. Sure they have a sign in book but I think there should be an extra precaution in place. Of course there should always be a person at the front desk to protect our loved ones from strangers that have no business walking in.

Another idea would be that they have HID proximity cards for family members that visit. The family members could just swipe their card and gain access to the building or better yet, for families that have a loved one in a more secured location. I forgot the code to gain access to where my Grandma Rose was living because she was in a secure area. I wrote the number down many times and even tried to remember it with a mnemonic device and I never remembered it. There would be times we couldn’t leave because we forgot the code to the elevator and we had to hunt down an employee. I know that safety for our loved ones is very important especially those that are already fragile.