There are many types of home care services offered by home care providers nowadays, home care nursing being one of them.
While it may sound pretty self-explanatory, do you actually know what this service entails?
All You Need to Know About Home Care Nursing
Home care nursing, as its name depicts, refers to nursing services provided to a person at home.
Such care involves more than just the normal, basic personal care that so many people have accustomed home care with – medical knowledge and expertise are part of the job’s requisite. Naturally, such care can only be provided by registered nurses who have undergone proper and professional training.
Home care nursing can come in a few types. Live-in, in the sense that your nurse resides in your home during the duration of care and looks after you around the clock, or they can live out and only attend to you when needed or on a set schedule.
One obvious difference between a registered nurse carer and a personal carer lies in the level of care provided. The former will be able to assist with more complex cases involving the provision of medication, which is something the latter is not allowed to do.
Amongst other things, the tasks that home care nursing can provide include (but are not limited to):
- Checking vital signs
- Wound care
- Cervical collar care
- Urinary catheters
- Removal of staples and sutures
- Post-operative recovery
- Continence management
- Pain management
Basically, you can expect all general nursing duties. In addition, home care nurses also usually follow the direct orders of a doctor when administering care so family members can rest assured that the standard of care their loved one is receiving at home is no different than that at the hospital.
When Is Home Care Nursing Necessary?
Thanks to the availability and provision of such services, growing old at home independently is now a possibility and this is the wish of many aging seniors. This means nursing homes or residential aged care facilities are not the only options for them anymore. Rather, and even if they may have a certain condition or illness, they can still choose to stay at home and have an in-home nurse care for them which is a scenario one can only dream of in the past.
At the same time, home care nursing also allows people to recover safely at home after being discharged from the hospital. One may have just undergone a surgery or is recovering from a fall, a certain illness etc. – home care nursing allows them to recover at the comfort of their own home.
This is especially helpful in terms of a quicker recovery for older seniors as many feels anxious and uneasy staying at the hospital. Being at home allows them to feel more relaxed and when one’s mental state is happier and healthier, it helps with recovering faster, too.