Getting Your Siblings’ Involvement in Caring for your Senior Parent
Fact of life: our parents grow old and become helpless. Without their grown children’s care and attention, our senior citizens would not have much of a fighting chance in living the normal, high quality life that they deserve. So as their children, you and your siblings must take the initiative in ensuring that your aging parents are still able to make the most out of life, however they can, especially when it comes to choosing the best medical alert systems for their safety.
Caring for your senior parent requires devotion and coordination among your siblings. Often, the decision takes more than a single meeting in order to iron out the kinks and differences. But arriving at a unified decision that all siblings agree to is not entirely impossible. No matter where the talks lead to, never forget that each of you deserves respect and has the right to be heard. Have a serious, heart to heart discussion with your siblings. Discuss everything that needs to be discussed: the financial aspect of caring for your aging parents, who takes care of what, whether to use an assisted care facility or a medical alert system, and a thousand other concerns.
Avoid squabbling as much as possible—listen to one another’s input with an open mind. Usually, the matter of taking care of one’s aging parents is not an easy thing to settle among the grown children. Each one of you may already have a family of their own, and coming from the daily, normal demands of raising a family in order to give time to the caring of your aging parents can be very difficult.
The usual option, of course, is placing your aging parents under the care of an assisted living facility, such as a nursing home. But such an option is becoming less and less affordable for most people—the average $40,000 price tag is almost next to impossible to meet, especially amid the current economic downturn.
The other option is letting your aging parents live in their own home, but under the constant monitoring provided by a medical alert system. Choosing to let your aging parents live in their old house independently has its pros and cons. The good thing is that your parents will be able to live out their twilight years in surroundings they love and are most familiar with. This could ensure that your senior parent will remain emotionally at ease, and thus could further have a positive contribution to their health. The challenge, however, is monitoring the parent’s health and safety. Some choose to hire a private nurse to live with the senior parents, but even such private nurses could not take care of them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And of course, the services of a private nurse can also be expensive.
Fortunately, technologies now exist to enable senior citizens to live in the comfort of their own home under the protection of a medical alert system. Thanks to advances in wireless telecommunication technologies, your parent—even if they live alone in their own home—will have a constantly reliable means of calling for help whenever it is needed. Medical alarms provider vary in the packages or extra services they “bundle” with the basic monitoring feature. If you are discussing with your siblings what type of medical alert you should provide your aging parent, make the decision from the perspective of convenience (for the parent) and reliability (does the medical alert provider have a track record for service reliability? Check out the current and past clients’ feedback). Also, depending on the senior parent’s health condition, you can also choose between a “manual” senior medical alert (one that the wearer still has to press in order to connect to the system) or automatic (detects when the wearer falls down and automatically calls for help without requiring input).
Such a system serves as your aging parents’ constant “lifeline”—any moment they need medical assistance, at any hour of any day, they only need to press the medical alert button, and a highly trained medical personnel comes to the rescue.
Your aging parent needs your help more as they advance in age, and it may take some effort to make sure they are completely well taken care of. But for people we love, what is effort, right? In that same vein of thought, for the immense help a medical alert system can provide, the monthly subscription fee becomes—already very minimal—becomes even more reasonable.
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