Tag Archives: new jersey

Ten Tips for Family Caregivers

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  1. Choose to take charge of your life, and don’t let your loved one’s illness or disability always take center stage.
  2. Remember to be good to yourself. Love, honor and value yourself. You’re doing a very hard job and you deserve some quality time, just for you.
  3. Watch out for signs of depression, and don’t delay in getting professional help when you need it.
  4. When people offer to help, accept the offer and suggest specific things that they can do.
  5. Educate yourself about your loved one’s condition. Information is empowering.
  6. There’s a difference between caring and doing. Be open to technologies and ideas that promote your loved one’s independence.
  7. Trust your instincts. Most of the time they’ll lead you in the right direction.
  8. Grieve for your losses, and then allow yourself to dream new dreams.
  9. Stand up for your rights as a caregiver and a citizen.
  10. Seek support from other caregivers. There is great strength in knowing you are not alone.

New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Bathroom Safety for Seniors

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

The bathroom and the kitchen are not the only places where your family member can get hurt. Most households have other danger zones as well. Controlling access to these areas becomes an issue sooner or later in most caregiving households.

When you care for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, accessibility can be a double-edged concern. You may want to make some areas in your home “off-limits”, such as outside doors, stairways, closets and other places where important or potentially harmful materials are stored. On the other hand, you may want to improve access to some areas – making tubs and showers more accessible or making stairways and outside steps easier to use.

As a rule of thumb, try to improve access in areas that encourage the person to do things independently as long as it is safe. Limit access when the family member’s abilities and understanding have diminished to the point that he or she needs supervision to be in an area.

Edlerly Face Fatality Risks When Driving

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

For many seniors, driving is inseparable from independence…
When it comes to auto fatalities, who do you think is more likely to die behind the wheel: your 16-year-old nephew or your 82-year-old grandmother? Your grandmother drives slowly and wears her seatbelt.  Your nephew speeds and talks on the cell phone. So the answer is your nephew, right?  No — the correct answer is your grandmother.

A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University indicates that elderly female drivers have a higher fatality rate per mile than 16-year-old boys. Statistics released by Traffic STATS, a new risk analysis of road fatalities produced by the university, shows that an 82-year-old female driver is 60 percent more likely to die on the road than a 16-year-old male driver because they are more frail.

“It’s not an issue of risk-taking behavior, but of fragility,” according to Anne McCartt, a research official at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.  Older people are more likely to die when they are injured in an accident, she adds, and points out that elderly women have the highest road death risks even when they are not driving — five times higher than the national average.

These figures make sense but the news gets worse. Statistics released this past year by the National Institute on Aging conclude that the fatality rate for seniors is going to skyrocket as the baby boomer generation ages and continues to drive. 

As previously indicated, elderly women in particular will be at risk. The numbers increase because the ratio of women to men will grow from 1-1 for young people to 100 women for every 35 men by age 85.

The goal of the research was to try to determine factors related to senior-driver crashes such as body region injured, severity of the crash and circumstances surrounding the fatal crash.  Results indicated:

Drivers 65 and over killed in car accidents were significantly more likely to die of a chest injury.     
Older drivers were more likely to die after the crash date.

Frailty or pre-existing conditions played a significant role in the deaths of older drivers.
If these predictions are correct, we can anticipate more elderly drivers and passengers and a greater number of fatalities among our senior population in the next decade.           

It’s a frightening prospect but before you take away grandma’s keys, consider the consequences. There’s a lot more to lose than just driving. There’s the loss of independence.

Interesting Words of Wisdom

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Inetrsteinig

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. Tthe olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig, huh?

Witty Words of Wisdom

  • Drive carefully. It’s not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
  • If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
  • When everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
  • If you can’t beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing.
  • You are what you eat. So stay away from the jerk chicken.
  • Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.
  • If you can’t be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.

Senior Retirement in New Jersey

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides senior care, home care & live-in care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Americans are reversing what had been a nearly century-long decline in the participation of older people in the workforce.

For both workers and employers, the rising number of older workers is the result of choice and circumstance.

Workers, faced with shrinking medical and dental benefits and less generous retirement plans, find they don’t have the financial resources to support themselves in retirement, so a lot more of them are returning to work.

Companies, faced with a labor gap that will rise to 4.8 million workers within 10 years and 20 million within 20 years, are seeing older workers in a new light. Older workers represent a pool of talent companies need.

Conventional wisdom used to be that employees over 50 cost companies more in terms of medical problems and missed workdays. But that may not be the case, as studies show that costs associated with older workers are about the same as those of younger workers.

Workers over 50 make up for additional health costs by being more reliable and often more productive than younger workers. An AARP survey of human resource professionals showed that 77% said that older workers have a higher level of commitment than younger workers, and 68% said it cost less or the same to train older workers compared to younger workers.

Older workers also tend to have fewer or no dependent-related health- or child-care costs, and they require lower training and recruitment costs, according to Gail Jern, human resources manager for Westaff.

NJ Respite Help for Family Home Health

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides senior care, home care & live-in care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Just a few years ago, workers were likely to need time away from work for parent-teacher conferences, running kids to medical appointments, and staying home to nurse sick children.

Today, workers are more likely to miss work because of the needs of their parents. “Elder care has begun to rival child care as a workplace issue, and companies have started to realize that such support props up not just workers but also the bottom line,” according to the Dallas Morning News.

The National Alliance for Caregiving estimates that one in six American workers cares for an older relative. Caregiving usually adds 18 hours to the 40 hours most workers clock at the office. That means that those workers are working a job-and-a-half. Some companies are now hiring geriatric care managers as resources for employees bewildered by the demands of parents who are no longer capable of living independently. Estimates are that one in five caregivers quits or looks for a less demanding job. And that makes businesses’ responsiveness to employees’ caregiving needs more than a nice thing to do; it makes it an essential thing to do

Older Adults Feeling Young

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides senior care, home care & live-in care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

A poll conducted by MetLife’s Mature Market Institute and Zogby International attempted to determine what age Americans believe is old.

If you’re under 30, you think age 61 marks the beginning of “old.”

If you’re between age 50 and 64, “old” doesn’t begin until age 71. No one 65 or older thinks 41 to 50 is old.

Men are almost three times more likely than women to say an age under 60 is old, and men are four times more likely than women to say that someone between 31 and 40 is old.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats or Independents to say that younger ages are old.

At Society of Certified Senior Advisors’ seminars, we ask people “how old do you feel?” Almost universally, people will subtract eight or ten years from their actual age. Put another way, “old” is all a matter of perspective!

Home Health Care New Jersey – Exercise Can Slow Alzheimer’s

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides home health care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Use it or lose it?  Evidence points to exercise as possibly slowing Alzheimer’s.

Exercising the body helps the brain. That’s the conclusion of a new study that reviewed the effects of exercise on brain functioning in humans and animals.

Based on a wide-ranging review of existing studies, researchers found a significant relationship between physical activity and later cognitive function and decreased occurrence of dementia. Better yet, the evidence suggests that the benefits may last several decades.

Studies of persons over age 65 found that those who exercised for at least 15-30 minutes at a time three times a week were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s Disease, even if they were genetically predisposed to the disease.

The exercise doesn’t have to be strenuous. One study of 62- to 70-year-olds who continued to work and retirees who moderately exercised, showed they had higher sustained levels of cerebral blood flow and superior performance on general measures of cognition as compared to the group of inactive retirees.

The review covered 40 years of research.

New Jersey Senior Care

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Is Attitude Everything?

Successful aging in New Jersey is an absence of (or minimum of) disease and disability. A new study of more than 500 persons from age 60 to 98 shows that people who think they are “aging successfully” aren’t necessarily the healthiest individuals. Optimism and effective coping tools, or attitude, were found be essential to successful aging more than traditional measures of health and wellness, according to a study funded by the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California-San Diego.

The study showed that persons who regularly read, write and socialize gave themselves higher scores than those who did not. Surprisingly, volunteer activities, which have long been thought to help persons age successfully, were not found to have the same positive influence. The bottom line is that those things leading to successful aging are well within an individual’s control. The key is adopting personal coping mechanisms and remaining as physically, socially and mentally active as possible.

Brain Fitness…Exercising Your Mind

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

It’s long been assumed that memory loss, slower thinking and eventual dementia are the natural results of aging.

Dr. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, disagrees. The human brain, he says, doesn’t need to decline with age. It, like the body, responds to exercise and stimuli.

Merzenich founded Posit Science, which is developing brain fitness programs designed to improve the thinking abilities of seniors. These self-paced computer programs are like video games, only these are designed to stimulate certain brain functions such as listening and memory. One hour a day, five days a week may increase cognitive functioning by as much as 10 years.

While the Posit Science Brain Fitness Program offers exciting possibilities for enabling an aging population’s minds to keep pace with ever increasing longevity, we’re not dependent upon a computer program to stretch and strengthen our brains.

Engaging in a range of activities that spur new learning as well as participating in physical activities that require an ongoing mastery of motor control will strengthen the brain.

Examples of such activities include:

learning to play a musical instrument or a new language
juggling
dancing
solving jigsaw puzzles
playing ping pong

In the not-so-distant future, senior centers, nursing homes and assisted living facilities may include “brain gymnasiums” along with recreation and exercise areas.