Families trust senior living communities and residential care communities to give their family members the best possible care. Because so many people depend on your services, running such a community can be stressful. However, there are ways to relieve some of the burdens you and your staff carry.
Finding the best of today’s many medical alert companies is essential for improving your residents’ experience, easing your employees’ workload, and streamlining your operations. In this blog, discover the state-of-the-art solutions a medical alert company should provide.
Alerting Staff Members to Slip and Fall Injuries
Although slips and falls can happen to anyone, they result in increasingly severe injuries as people age. As people get older, their bones become more brittle and their balance deteriorates. Therefore, falls are more common and serious in senior care communities.
Residents cannot always have direct supervision from a staff member. They can fall behind closed doors where nobody will notice. If a senior falls and injures themselves where nobody can help, the fall may become life-threatening. Whether they broke bones, are bleeding internally, or sustained other injuries, they need help as soon as possible.
While you can’t entirely remove the possibility of slips and falls in your community, you can take measures to ensure falls aren’t more severe than they need to be. A medical alert company needs to provide your community with a way for residents to alert staff members and emergency contacts to a fall or injury. Preferably, the company should give the residents an alert device they can carry with them so they’re always prepared should an incident occur.
Preventing Potentially Harmful Medication Errors
Seniors often take various daily medications to maintain their health and treat past health problems. Such medicines are essential to their well-being, and should be taken according to the doctor’s orders. If a resident misses their medication frequently because they forget to take it, the mistake can have serious health ramifications.
While staff members will do their best to keep residents on their medication schedules, human error will inevitably cause some seniors to miss medications. To prevent missed pills, your medical alert company should provide devices that offer personalized medication reminders.
Encouraging Communication With Family Members
Care communities do their best to welcome seniors and make them feel at home. But seniors’ experience of moving out of their homes and into a new community can be jarring. After all, seniors may have lived in their house for decades. They’ve made countless memories within those walls.
While seniors will be more removed from their families than they were before moving into a care community, communicating with family members is one way they can stay connected. Frequent communication with family members and other loved ones makes and keeps their relationships strong.
In addition, communication can help prevent mistreatment. Whether they feel other seniors are being unkind to them or staff members aren’t providing the attention they need, seniors need a way to not only vent their frustrations but also alert others to possible problems before they grow more serious. Therefore, the medical alert company you choose should provide communication services to connect and protect seniors.
Tracking Services to Locate Wandering Residents
As seniors age, they may begin to wander and elope from care communities. If a senior does manage to wander away, they endanger themselves.
They may also expose the community to liability. Because communities are supposed to protect their residents and prevent them from wandering off, an eloped resident’s family can sue the community depending on the severity of the injuries.
And residents who do manage to wander away create extremely stressful situations for caregivers. They must locate the resident as soon as possible.
Residents should have GPS trackers on their persons at all times. Preferably, these trackers are integrated into the wearable devices the alert company offers. But in some way, your medical alert company needs the capability to track and protect wandering residents.
The Best Medical Alert Company For Your Community
The right medical alert company can make such a significant, positive difference to your senior living community. It can simplify your operations and improve the care you can provide your residents.
But to do so, it must include the following functionalities in its devices:
- Distress alerts
- Medication reminders
- Communication facilitation
- Location tracking
HandsFree Health has the technology to modernize your community and provide these functions. Our WellBe® smartwatch, pendent, and speaker can make your residents safer and healthier than ever before.
The four capabilities discussed in this blog are only the beginning of what the WellBe system can do. To find out more about senior living technology in action, click for your free copy of our eBook, The Senior Living Community Guide to Senior-Focused Technology.