When it comes to the senior care that you or another is giving to an elderly loved one, one of the easiest ways to keep tabs on their health is to track their symptoms. This kind of journal will help a physician to better determine whether the type of care that your mom or dad is receiving is right for them. A journal also has a built in safeguard to it. Many people are in a sort of denial about the state of their loved one’s health. People don’t tend to do this on purpose, but it’s rather a way to protect themselves from having to deal with the emotional pain of watching a loved one suffer. When you write it down, it becomes more permanent and more real to you. If their health declines, it will be much easier to identify if and when medical attention should be sought. This can be beneficial when your loved one has Alzheimer’s or their health is expected to decline for some other reason.
This is a great way to ensure that there is continuity of care, too. If you are providing care sometimes, but while you are at work there is a professional in-home caregiver helping them, a journal can ensure that important information is passed back and forth. Symptoms are just one part of this. In this instance, the journal acts as a mode of communication to ensure that you know anything important that happened during the day, and anything relevant for the caregiver to do their job effectively will be passed on by you, as well. It creates a better way to ensure that important things are known by the people most directly involved in the care of your parent.
You can do this in a traditional journal, or you can keep an online diary. Many people prefer the online diary because you can sync it across different devices so that multiple people can access and add to it, giving a more complete look at your loved one’s health from multiple points of view. There are journalling apps that you might want to consider, but as far as what we have seen, the simplest way to do this is just to create a new document on a cloud sharing tool, like Dropbox or Google Drive. These are free to use, and if you really want to get fancy, you can add a customized template. You don’t have to though, so it all depends on which makes this more direct and easier to manage for you.
The purpose for this note taking is to ensure that your loved one is getting the care that they need, and that nothing is being missed as different people help them out. The information that you have, their caregiver will have. And the information that you and the caregiver has, their doctor will have access to, too. It’s a simple way to make sure that nothing is missed, and if something comes up that your caregiver sees that you might not be trained to see, you can make arrangements to get them help.
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