We have talked a little bit before about respite care. The word ‘respite’ means to rest or to take a break from something. Respite care offers people who are full-time caregivers to ailing family members just that: a chance to take a break and rest for a bit. And we at Best In-Home Care know how important that rest can be.

Why Do I Need A Respite Caregiver?

Imagine yourself some time in the future, as an aging parent with adult children. How many hours a week do you want your children to spend caring for you? Most likely, 24/7 is not your answer. It is easy to look at your own children and think, “I hope they visit me – but they don’t need to set their entire life aside to take care of me!”

So then why do we feel the need to take care of our own parents seven days a week? We have our reasons – we love them, we care about them, we don’t want anything bad to happen to them while they’re alone. In fact, even if we tell them not to, our kids will probably end up devoting their lives to taking care of us one day! It makes sense, and we are usually happy to do it and couldn’t imagine it any other way. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend every hour of your week with your aging parents. Just like any other job, it is important to have a life of your own. You will be a better caretaker if you also take care of yourself.

You Should Never Feel Guilty About Respite Care

Respite care doesn’t mean you can’t handle the responsibility of taking care of your parents or aging relatives. Respite care can actually improve your relationship with your ailing parents because it gives you a chance to rejuvenate. Respite care can range from a few hours a day to a few hours a week, and offers caregivers the ability to leave their aging parents without worrying about what will happen to them. When you take time away from your parents, whether it is to run errands or relax, you shouldn’t have to burden your mind with thoughts of, “What if they fall? What if they need something? What if they get lonely?” That doesn’t sound very relaxing at all! Our respite caregivers are trained, friendly, and reliable. They will make sure your family member is safe while you’re away, so you don’t have to worry about them being left alone.

Best In-Home Care Can Help

We believe that Best In-Home care has the best caregivers in Texas. If you are taking care of an aging relative in Lubbock and are in need of respite care, contact us today. Our passionate caregivers will spend meaningful time with your loved one, ensuring that any necessary duties are performed to keep them comfortable and smiling.

Remember, taking care of a parent isn’t something you have to handle alone. Making sure you are still living your life is key to having a healthy and fulfilling relationship with your loved one in their remaining years. Taking a few hours every week to take care of yourself will give you time to relax, to breathe, to rejuvenate, and to look forward to coming home to your parent again.

We’re so glad that you’ve taken the time to browse around our Lubbock home care blog.

As a locally-owned and operated home care company here in Texas, we’re dedicated to providing high-quality, affordable home health care options to seniors in Lubbock as well as the family members who love and worry about them.

Home Care Allows Seniors To Age With Dignity

We understand how hard it can be to come to terms with the fact that your health is deteriorating. We know how difficult it can be to think about leaving the home that you’ve built here in Lubbock and in which you created so many memories with your family.

We’re also aware of the research that suggests seniors who’re allowed to stay in their residence with the help of home care typically enjoy better mental and physical health.

Our Home Care Agency Is Professional And Passionate

Our home health agency is passionate about providing home care assistance to seniors so that they can remain living in the homes they love for as long as possible. We believe that with the right home care, your senior loved one can maintain their independence while still being looked after by professional caregivers.

We’re also passionate about providing support services for family members who may have been forced into the caregiver role in the past. This can be very stressful for untrained family members who have such close emotional ties to their senior loved one. We want you to enjoy your loved one’s golden years, not resent them because you have to bear the burden of in-home care all on your own.

We hope you’ll follow this blog closely as we share news and tips regarding home care for seniors in Lubbock. We also hope that you’ll contact us if there’s any way that home health care from Best In Home Care LLC can make your life easier.

Check out our full list of services here, and contact us for more information today!

We’ve written many different articles extolling the virtues of home health care in general, and the services we provide here at Best In-Home Care in Lubbock, Texas. We believe that when it comes to striking a balance between the sustainability of independence and providing a safe, comfortable lifestyle for seniors, home health care provides a solution that few other options can rival.

Choosing the type of care that’s best for your senior loved one isn’t easy. It’s difficult to acknowledge that your parent or grandparent isn’t capable of maintaining their total independence, while on the other hand, it’s very difficult to admit that you don’t have the time or resources to be your loved one’s primary caretaker.

That’s where our home care services come in. Here at Best In-Home Care, we’ve built a reputation as Lubbock’s preferred provider of home-based health care services. We’re passionate about keeping senior citizens safe and healthy, while also allowing them to remain in their own homes where they feel most comfortable.

How are we able to provide this superior level of service? Because of our experienced, well-trained home care workers. Keep reading to learn more about this profession, as well as the opportunities you may have to turn your passion for home care into a job with us here at Best In-Home Care.

Home Care Workers Are Vital To The Future Of Health Care

When most people think of health care, they imagine doctors and nurses, in scrubs and white lab coats, who work in hospitals and private practices. But in doing so, they overlook one of the fastest growing segments of health care: home caregivers.

“…as the American population gets older and the health-care system caters more and more to the needs of elderly and disabled people, this growing army of millions of home-care workers will be one of the most valuable elements in keeping the whole system afloat,” explains The Atlantic.

The types of people who choose to become home care providers come from a variety of personal and professional backgrounds, including:

• Registered Nurses (RNs)
• Licensed Vocational or Practical Nurses (LVN, LPNs)
• Personal Care Aides (PCAs)
• Home Health Aides (HHAs)
• Physical Therapists (PTs)
• Occupational Therapists (OTs)
• Medical Social Workers (MSWs)

No specific training or type of education is required to be a home care worker, which is why specialized training provided by the employer is so important.

What Makes Our Home Caregivers Different From The Rest?

Home caregivers become an intimate part of a senior citizen’s life. They may be present in the home daily, weekly, or overnight, or they may be hired for 24-hour, live-in assignments. Because of this close relationship, we believe it’s important to hire home health care providers that are truly passionate about the industry.

We believe the caregivers we hire here at Best In-Home Care in Lubbock are the cream of the crop. In addition to reserving our open positions for caregivers that have robust experience, we also provide continuous training through our one of a kind curriculum. We’re proud of the fact that our training programs are more robust than any other home care provider in Texas, after all, you’re trusting us with your family member…nothing less than the best will do!

We Have Job Opportunities For Home Health Care Providers

Inspired to provide home care to seniors? Contact us to inquire about open positions today.

Hospitalization is typically a health care choice reserved for serious events that threaten our wellness, like an acute disease or traumatic injury. Unfortunately, these events can become more frequent during the senior years. Both compromised immune systems and fall hazards in the home can make hospitalization necessary from time to time, but it is always the hope of family and health care professionals alike that these stays will only be temporary. Here at Best In-Home Care in Lubbock, we strive to provide an affordable, convenient, and superior option to nursing homes and other post-hospitalization recovery environments.

Learn more about In-Home Health Care!

Why Is It Important To Plan For Health Care After Hospitalization?

You might be wondering why home health care is so important after hospitalization. Due to the ever-increasing costs of an extended stay in the hospital, many seniors and their families take advantage of discharge as soon as it’s allowed by their doctor. This often means that seniors are discharged long before their recovery and/or rehabilitation is complete. If the proper plans aren’t made for continued rehabilitation after discharge from the hospital, the odds of hospital readmission go up. To avoid this, we always encourage families to explore all of their options after hospitalization, including senior home care in Lubbock, provided by Best In-Home Care. The type of post-hospital care that’s right for your senior will depend upon the reason for hospitalization as well as your budget.

Options For Health Care After A Hospital Stay

1. Nursing Homes/Rehab Hospitals – If the reason for hospitalization was very serious, resulting in a need for 24-hour nursing services and skilled medical care, a nursing home might be the best option for your senior. In these facilities, the environment and treatment will be very similar to what your senior experienced in the hospital.
2. In-Home Senior Care – If the reason for hospitalization was less severe, resulting in a need for supervision, assistance with some everyday tasks, and help making it to follow up appointments at the doctor’s office, in-home senior care may be a better and more affordable options than a nursing home. Ask yourself and your doctor whether you would be able to handle the after care needs of your senior if time and energy weren’t an issue. If the answer is yes, contact Best In-Home Care in Lubbock for more information about our services!
3. Assisted Living – If you don’t feel that you would be able to handle the rehabilitation process on your own at home, or are worried that complications might arise in the middle of the night, assisted living facilities might be a good choice. In these facilities, seniors enjoy a more home-like environment, but staff are on hand 24 hours day. Physical therapy and occupational therapy are usually also available in assisted living facilities.

In-Home Senior Care Keeps Lubbock Families Together!

Your senior loved one will likely have a faster and more pleasant recovery if they’re allowed to stay in their own home. Click the button below to schedule a FREE in-home assessment today.

Schedule Your Assessment!

There are some parts of getting older that many people enjoy. In their older years, many people are able to retire, finally getting the time to travel, enjoy quality time with grand-kids, or the ability to relocate to a place where they’ll never have to shovel snow again. Of course, there are some drawbacks to getting older as well, mostly physical. Keep reading to learn why slipping and falling is one of the most dangerous aspects of getting older and how our elder care experts can help the seniors in your community protect themselves from this health hazard.

Slip-And-Fall Hazards Are A Serious Health Threat For The Elderly

“Each year, millions of older people—those 65 and older—fall,” explains the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “In fact, more than one out of four older people falls each year, but less than half tell their doctor. Falling once doubles your chances of falling again.”

When you’re young, with greater bone density and flexibility, falling down isn’t something you have to fear. In fact, falling down is an important part of life! Think about learning to walk, ride a bike, rollerskate, or ski: all of these activities likely meant that you fell down a lot! However as we age, our bodies become more brittle and unable to handle the trauma of falling down.

When elderly people fall, they can suffer:

• Broken bones, especially wrists, arms, ankles, and hips
• Head injuries, which is very serious is the elder in your care is taking blood thinners
• Fear of falling again, which can be debilitating for a senior who is living alone without elder care services.

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Common Fall Hazards Seniors Need To Watch Out For

Part of our professional elder care service is making sure that the senior’s home is devoid of as many slip and fall hazards as possible. There are lots of normal household items and situations that can trigger a fall, you just have to know where to look!

• Throw Rugs – According to many experts, these small area rugs are one of the biggest causes of senior falls. Why? Because these small rugs aren’t attached to the floor and are often placed in kitchens, hallways, and other rooms that have wood or laminate flooring, which is very slippery.
• Clutter – Without the assistance of an elder care specialist, it’s very easy for an elderly person’s home to get cluttered. This precariously piled junk can make it hard to move about the home, and in some cases may even fall down on a person when they try to access a part of it.
• Staircases – Steep, narrow, or particularly slippery stairwells are a huge hazard for seniors, even if they’ve been climbing them their entire lives.
• Poor Lighting – Without the ability to see something on the floor in front of them, it’s very easy for seniors to trip over things they might otherwise have been able to avoid.
• Pets – Seniors love their cats and dogs, and we realize that these animals provide much-needed companionship for an elderly person who’s living alone. However, pets love to get underfoot, which can cause a slip and fall hazard for seniors.
• Unstable Furniture – Sometimes the furniture in a senior’s home can be just as old as they are! While antique furniture is beautiful it may also be rickety, increase the chance of an accident.

Our Elder Care Specialists Offer A Fall Prevention Program To Keep Seniors Safe

Prepare your loved ones for the increased hazards of living on their own with our Elderly Care Fall Prevention Workshop! Contact us to schedule this informative events today.

When you were in your twenties and thirties, you probably didn’t spend much time thinking about what life would be like in your senior years. When you’re young, your health problems are typically limited to acute events and you can’t wait for the day when you can take care of yourself physically and financially. You never imagine that you’ll be in need of home health care someday.

Things change as you get older, however. You begin to understand that good health rarely lasts forever. The unavoidable aspects of aging, like reduced mobility, longer recovery time from illnesses, impaired hearing and vision, make it obvious that there may come a time when living independently becomes a challenge, if not an outright health risk.

Many seniors go on for far too long by themselves, until finally, an injury or illness lands them in the hospital. In the past few years, seniors facing health complications have caused a marked uptick in Lubbock hospital admissions, putting pressure on hospital staffs as well as seniors’ pocketbooks.

Health Care Issues For Seniors

Once you make it to 65, the data suggest that you can live another 19.3 years, on average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). However, your quality of life during those years depends on your access to health care for managing chronic conditions such as:

• Arthritis
• Heart Disease
• Cancer
• Respiratory Diseases
• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Osteoporosis
• Diabetes
• Influenza and Pneumonia
• Broken Bones
• Substance Abuse
• Obesity
• Depression
• Oral Health
• Shingles

Why Hospitals Aren’t The Best Options For Healing

Hospitals, and more specifically emergency rooms, are designed to treat acute health problems for a wide variety of patients. These services aren’t necessarily created or executed with senior health care issues in mind. Hospital care is often impersonal, rushed, and expensive for seniors. When the goal is healing and recovery, hospitals are rarely the best option.

Senior-Specific Home Health Care Is The Solution

As reported in a recent issue of Home Health Care News, services that allow seniors to return to their homes as soon as possible are actually the best option, for seniors, their families, and their finances. Senior home care providers are dialed in to the needs and desires of their clients, providing environments and services that go a long way toward helping them remain healthy and independent.

We Provide The Best Senior Home Care In Lubbock

If you’re looking for an alternative to hospitals and nursing homes for your beloved senior, we invite you to consider Best In-Home Care LLC. Based right here in Lubbock, we’ve been helping families gain peace and health through quality home health care services for many years.

Whether your senior loved one is recovering from a visit to the hospital, or merely trying to avoid one, the highly-trained home health care professionals at Best In-Home Care would love to be able to provide them with a customized level of care that will brighten their spirits and ensure many years of independent living to come.

Contact us today!

On the surface, home care services might not seem like a very emotional business. People in Lubbock need health care and assistance in their homes, and Best In Home Care LLC provides it. What’s so emotional about that?

When you stop to consider how much people in Lubbock care for their elderly loved ones, and how difficult it can be to get seniors to admit that they need a little help to remain in their homes, things can get emotional quickly.

Home Care Services Let You Focus On What’s Important

Best In Home Care isn’t here to stir up trouble for your Lubbock family. Instead, we want to help you enjoy your time with your senior loved one through home health care and services!

Don’t think you need our help? Just take a look at these three things that will once again become possible when you utilize our home care services:

1. Sending The Grandkids For A Visit – When seniors start to experience limited mobility, housekeeping can suffer. No one wants to visit a dirty, cluttered house, but with assistance from the caregivers at Best In-Home Care in Lubbock, everything is kept neat and tidy.
2. Enjoying A Family Dinner – With the home care providers at Best In-Home Care, your senior loved one will always be stocked with fresh groceries, so you can all enjoy a homecooked meal together again.
3. Going On Vacation – If you’ve been putting off a trip to the beach because you’re worried what will happen to your senior loved one while you’re away, overnight home care from our providers will give you the chance to finally relax.

Contact us to learn more about how we can assist your Lubbock family with home care.

When it comes to hiring someone to provide care for the senior in your life, the decision can feel overwhelming.

Whether you’re looking for elder care for a parent, aunt or uncle, or your own spouse, it’s never easy to trust a stranger to provide the services that your loved one needs without putting them at risk.

We’ve all heard the elder care horror stories that make national headlines, and that’s why it’s so important to hire a Lubbock senior care provider that will never put your you or your loved one in a bad position.

We’ve Worked Hard To Be Lubbock’s Preferred Elder Care Provider

Best In-Home Care LLC is proud to be Lubbock’s choice for elder care. We believe we have become a trusted member of the community because of the people we hire to provide senior care services.

Here are just three things that set our elder care providers apart from others in the industry:

• Not Contractors – Unlike many elder care service providers, who hire contractors from employment agencies or even “freelance” senior home care providers, each and every caregiver we hire is a full-time employee of Best In Home Care, trained by our founders.
• Compassionate – When we interview potential elder care providers for a position here at Best In Home Care, we’re concerned with two things: their experience and their compassion. It’s important to us that every one of our employees has a real passion for senior services.
• Bonded & Insured – Each elder care provider we hire here at Best In Home Care is thoroughly screened, background-checked, bonded and insured. This provides peace of mind that you can trust this person to protect and care for your senior loved one.

Contact Best In-Home Care LLC in Lubbock today to learn more about our elder care services.

Respite care is a very important part of what Best In Home Care LLC does here in the Lubbock area. A vast majority of elder caregivers are related to the patient in some way, and this unpaid work can be both stressful and financially taxing for those involved. Sometimes, you just need a break.

What Are Respite Care Services?

We provided a more in-depth description of respite services in a previous article, but for now we’ll just remind you that respite care is designed to provide a break for tired, familial caregivers. The word respite means “rest” and when you hire us to provide respite care for your loved one in Lubbock, it allows you to relax mentally and physically.

Yes, Medicare Does Cover Respite Care But…

Many caretakers love the sound of respite care, but then they immediately wonder how much it’s going to cost. If your senior loved one is covered by Medicare, you might be interested to know that the government does indeed cover respite care, however, coverage is only provided if the situation meets several stipulations.

Conditions Surrounding Medicare Coverage Of Respite Care

In order to have Medicare pay for respite care, your loved one must be dealing with a life-threatening illness that qualifies him or her for the hospice benefit. This is the stipulation even though respite care is different from hospice care.

“Under the Medicare hospice benefit, your loved one can get respite care in a Medicare-approved hospital or skilled nursing facility for up to five days at a time. Medicare will pay 95 percent of the Medicare-approved amount for respite care,” explains Medicare Interactive.

If you’d like to know more about the affordable respite care services provided by Best In Home Care LLC, simply contact us. We’d love to hear about your budget and figure out a way to provide you with the rest you need.

If you were to ask middle-aged people in Lubbock how they planned to deal with the limitations of aging later in life, most would probably reply, “My kids will take care of me!”

It’s true that one of the many blessings of creating children is that you have a built in support system for your senior years. Many children happily take on the role of caretaker when their mother or father is dealing with reduced mobility or other issues later in life.

This tradition begs an interesting question: What if you never had children? Or, what if you have children but they live far away from your home in Lubbock?

Best In Home Care LLC specializes in elder care for those who may not have children living with them in the Lubbock area. Keep reading to learn some of the special ways our elder care services are helping to keep Lubbock seniors in their homes where they feel most comfortable.

Statistics About The Need For Elder Care

• As of 2014, one in five baby boomers is childless, and approximately 30 percent of adults will enter old age single (never married, widowed, or divorced).
• 80 percent of elder care is provided at home by children or other family members

If these statistics describe you, there’s no need to worry about how you and/or your spouse will be taken care of. Simply get educated about elder care and how it can take the place of these familial caretakers.

When you hire Best In Home Care LLC to provide elder care services, you’ll enjoy the following benefits (just to name a few!):

• 24-Hour care without the high costs of a nursing home
• Assistance in attending doctor’s appointments, getting groceries, and home maintenance
• Faster healing times after surgery or illness
• Reduced stress and feelings of loneliness or lost identity
• Building relationships with our trusted elder care providers

Contact Best In Home Care LLC to learn more about our elder care services in Lubbock today.