When you live a considerable distance away from a beloved senior, yet are responsible for his or her care, you’re a long-distance caregiver. You may desire to live close to this person, but there are many reasons that you live far away. You cannot help the fact that work and your family are keeping you away from your elderly relative, but this doesn’t signify that you can’t help manage his or her life from a distance.
Modern-day tech, apps, and services are making your job as a long-distance caregiver much easier. Here are some ideas on using technology to take care of your beloved senior from afar.
Using Apps to Hire Help
While you won’t be able to be close to your much-loved senior most months of the year, you can arrange to hire a qualified caregiver to handle primary, and even secondary, caregiving tasks. Multiple websites exist that connect you with housekeepers or private nurses that live in the same town as your beloved senior. Even if seniors can independently take care of themselves, it’s comforting to know that hired help can go and check in on their health or make sure they’ve been taking their meds. When you hire a housekeeper, you can have her prepare and store meals in the freezer or fridge, perform difficult house-maintenance chores, and even move around heavier items.
TaskRabbit is a smartphone app that helps you to find and book qualified “taskers” to perform chores and one-time tasks for the benefit of your senior. These include fixing a leak, picking up groceries when the weather isn’t cooperating, putting together an appliance or new furniture piece, and more. The app is great for pitching you an array of qualified candidates for the task you have in mind.
The free smartphone app CareZone allows you to facilitate arranged caretaking duties with a relative or private nurse. The app enables you to share documents, medication checklists, schedules, care journals, task lists, contact information, and more. This is all information vital for taking care of your senior relative.
CareZone can be lifesaving when seniors are sorting, organizing, and discarding stuff no longer needed in their home. Especially following an accident, when the mobility of the senior is impaired, being able to put together a team of taskers to help execute a downsizing project shared on CareZone is important. You may also want your senior to have more space to move around in. Alternatively, you can hire a professional home organizer who specializes in organizing senior homes to sort and store away your senior’s possessions in a way that makes it easy for him or her to find them.
The Takeaway
Modern technology, apps, and services, including video-conversation apps such as Skype and FaceTime, will always be able to help you check in on your beloved senior. Feeling guilty? Remind yourself that if seniors are living alone and have a taste for independence, then they’ll be alright with being taken care of remotely. Your senior will make allowances for the fact that you are doing the best you can, under distance restrictions, and will be grateful for any and all help he or she indirectly receives from you from far away.
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