Taking Care of Your Parents: What You Should Know About Aged Care

0
560

As our parents get advanced in age, they find it harder to do many things by themselves.

They find it harder to cater to themselves, they find it harder to clean their homes by themselves, their health starts to decline, and they even find it harder to take care of their body themselves. For most children whose parents have gotten to that age of “dependency,” where they have to depend on others to carry out their day-to-day activities, taking care of them can be very difficult for you.

Look at it this way. On your own, you have your family to take care of, a business to run, or a career to pursue. Now, imagine combining all of that with taking care of your aged parents.

That will be tons of work and stress on your part. To help you take care of your aged parents while you mind your other businesses, you need to introduce your aged parents to something called Aged Care.

Let’s delve deeper into what Aged Care is all about.

What is Aged Care?

Aged Care is the embodiment of all the needs and support services offered explicitly to senior citizens to help them live in good health and make them independent of their family and friends. These support services can include the following:

Home care 

This is a support care service that is provided to the elderly in their own homes. Also known as in-home or domiciliary care, this type of Aged Care Service entails that the senior citizen is taken care of by professional care assistants or nurses in their home. These nurses assist the elderly by doing the following:

  • Bathing them.
  • Cooking for them and/or feeding them.
  • Laundry and home cleaning services.
  • Money management.
  • Helping them with their prescription.
  • Other home care services are peculiar to senior citizens.

Residential care

Also known as the Nursing Home service, this aged care service is designed for elderly people suffering from one medical problem or the other. So, if you’re in Melbourne, there are amazing residential care options for the aged and you need one. The great thing about this Aged Care Service is that these special people are permanently taken care of in a facility so that their personal, and most importantly, their medical needs are well catered to.

Hospice Care

Not the most palatable of all, the Aged Care Services, Hospice Care Service is designed for elderly people in the last leg of life. That is aged ones who are gradually losing their lives to terminal diseases.

This type of Aged Care Service aims to give elderly people the comfort and peace that they need to live a painless and stress-free life before they pass on.

Assisted living

For this type of Aged Care, the senior citizens are cared for in a housing facility. In this kind of Aged Care setting, the aged are kept in a place where both medical and personal services are being rendered to them.

This sort of Aged Care Service is different from the regular Nursing Home service that we discussed earlier. Although both are assisted living facilities, they are different from each other. The difference between both is that one is for elderly people requiring immediate medical needs (Nursing Home), while the other is for elderly people who don’t require medical attention (Assisted Living).

Adult Daycare

This type of Aged Care Service is different from the others. The difference is that an adult daycare service is a non-residential service whereby the elderly people are supported medically, nutritionally, personally, and socially for a length of time in a day. In the adult daycare centers, these senior citizens are catered to for about 9 to 12 hours a day before they are discharged to go home to their respective families or caregivers.

How are Aged Care Services Funded?

It is not untrue that these above-mentioned Aged Care Services cost a lot of money, and you might be wondering how they are funded or if you need to part away with some cash to foot your parents’ needs.

First of all, there are two major ways by which Aged Care Services are Funded. The first way is the personal funds. That is, the money is paid by your parents themselves from either their pension, personal savings, or retirement funds, or you or any member of the family can help with the payment.

On the other hand, if you and your parents can’t afford to pay for the services, there’s the option of leaning on the Australian government (either state or federal) healthcare programs for senior citizens.

Now that you are familiar with the different types of aged care services obtainable for senior citizens and how they can be funded, the next question that you might ask yourself is which aged care service should you get your parents into.

Just as you can rightly deduce from the explanations, you can see that there are different options to pick from. In the same vein, your parents’ needs are distinct, and to help them, and you have to select the Aged Care Service that fits their specific needs.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here