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Anna Preston
by on January 4, 2019
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When your elderly relative reaches the point of requiring home caret you may have already got into a routine of visiting them daily to check up on their well-being and it can seem quite alien to no longer have that responsibility. Equally, you may feel guilty for not visiting daily and for leaving your loved one in someone else’s hands. In safe hands All live-in carers go through a rigorous process to ensure that they are trustworthy and capable. Introductory agencies will perform thorough background checks including following up references and commissioning DBS searches before allowing any carers details to be passed onto families. Full-management agencies will perform equally deep checks but additionally may provide their own training to ensure that your carer can cope with whatever the placement throws at them. You can find out more at the live in care hub about what checks a carer is required to undergo before starting work, but what this means in practice is that you can rest assured that your parent or other elderly relation, is going to be cared for professionally and consistently by their carer. How often is too often? A live-in carer is there not just to care for their client but to help the family by taking over the care of their elderly relative. Obviously if you spend as much time at your loved one’s home as you did previously you will achieve nothing other than getting in the way of the carer’s work! Short daily visits are perfectly adequate to check that the carer has no concerns and to keep in touch with your loved one. Depending on what you, the carer and the agency have agreed these visits may be timed to coincide with the carer’s breaks, ensuring 24/7 coverage in care for your relation. How often is too rare? Trusting your live-in carer is essential to the relationship you have with them – and once they’ve settled in you can find yourself dropping visits and putting off visiting knowing that your loved one is being cared for and happy. It is important that you still keep some kind of visiting schedule. The carer can supervise your loved one’s life but they cannot run it, and there will be many situations in which you will be required to make decisions that will require your personal attention. How do I know if I’ve got the frequency right? Your gut instinct will tell you if you are visiting too often or not often enough. If you seem to be always getting in the way then perhaps you need to visit a little less often. If there always seems to be a lot of things to discuss that have changed since the last time you visited then perhaps you aren’t coming round often enough. The beauty of live-in care is that it can be precisely tailored to the family the carer is working for, so try different frequencies until it feels right.
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