Tuesday, May 22, 2007
When a House is Not a Home (from ParentCareSolution)
I saw some statistics the other day that said that roughly 86% of Americans want to stay in their homes as long as they possibly can. Here’s the challenge with that desire: Nearly 99% of the homes are not designed to do that. The opportunity in all of this is to start thinking now about the adaptations that need to be made to allow you to age gracefully in front of the 60 inch liquid plasma TV with the Dolby sound system throbbing around you. The alternative to this planning is that if you want to stay in your home and decide not to plan, your dining room needs to be big enough to accommodate a hospital bed and the home theatre has to have a Porta-Potty in it. Here are some suggestions:
- The hallways need to be wheelchair compatible and all the bathrooms need to be wheelchair accessible. That means that the big garden tub that you had installed to use when your children leave home is going to be the world’s largest indoor planter if you can’t access it. Showers have to be accessible via wheelchair. They also need to be big enough to accommodate sitting down if you have to.
- If you have a two story house make sure you have some pictures of the second floor to remind you what it looks like. A stroke, Parkinson’s, arthritis, or any number of other debilitating illnesses can make the upstairs only a memory and completely inaccessible. Make sure that your downstairs can accommodate all the things you will want to do.
- Consider dedicating a room for an at home caregiver. The mother in law suite of the 70’s and 80’s is going to give way to the Caregiver Suite for the 21st Century. There is a real possibility that a caregiver will live longer in the house than your children and at the same time actually help you with things.
- Get with Technology as quickly as you can. Allow a monitoring service to be installed so the people that care about you can tell when you don’t get out of bed for two weeks. Make sure something reminds you to take your medicines and gives you the right ones to take. Put a webcam on your computer so you can talk with your kids each morning. Put a microchip in your dog so when you let him out and forget to let him in someone can bring him back to you. Make sure there are sensors on your stove so that after you cook the green beans you make sure you don’t end up being cooked from a stove left on too long. Have automatic shutoffs on the water in the tub and washing machine so you don’t drown in your bathtub or need a kayak in your den. Use Technology to help people help you. View it as a pretty cheap caregiver and one that doesn’t show up late for work.
- Hire a service to help you with your meals. Older folks forget to eat. A meal service can double as a health monitoring tool. If you aren’t eating you aren’t going to be doing much of anything else after a while. Besides, you deserve having Wolfgang Puck Oatmeal.
- Talk to your family about what you would like. The reason people are left with no choices here is that they don’t tell anyone what choices they would like to have. To continue to operate autonomously and with great freedom you have to work in teamwork more with the people who care about you.
You can definitely age in place. The trick here is to have a place that's suitible for aging.
SimplyHome website
