Personal Care at Home in Margate
The shower, the clothes, the lavatory. This is the part of a day that families give up on first, and the part that most needs describing carefully before anybody agrees to it.
The job that changes a family
Almost everything else can be shared out. Somebody cooks, somebody else drives to the pharmacy. Washing a parent is the one job that very few relatives go on doing indefinitely, and the strain of it rarely announces itself as a complaint about washing.
Handing it over usually mends a relationship that had begun avoiding half past seven in the morning. The daughter is a daughter again and the awkward quarter of an hour belongs to somebody who does not find it awkward.
It is also the hour where a precise description matters most, because the person receiving it has the least appetite for surprises. We say exactly what will happen, in what order, before anybody comes.
Personal care is usually bought as one short visit each morning rather than a long one, and twenty-five to forty minutes covers most houses at the start.
It lengthens later, once breakfast and the kitchen begin folding into the same visit.
What the visit consists of
Hands-on work, paced by the person rather than by the clock on the wall.
Whichever wash is safe that day
Standing, sitting or at the basin, decided on the morning rather than fixed a month ago.
Their own clothes, their own order
Chosen by them and laid ready, with a hand offered only where a button or a zip has become impossible.
The lavatory, without ceremony
Slow, ordinary, and repeated often enough that it stops counting as an occasion.
Hair, teeth, nails and skin
Dealt with at the one point in the week when anything amiss can actually be seen.
Lifting that protects two people
Bed to chair to bathroom, done the proper way instead of hauled up by an arm.
A note before the door closes
Better or worse than last time, with anything on the skin that deserves another look.
Jobs that belong elsewhere
- Anything a nurse is trained for
- Wounds and dressings of every description
- Medicines, whether handed over or prompted
- Exercise programmes set by a therapist
- Any lift that genuinely wants a second pair of hands, or kit nobody organised
- Anything refused on the morning
Hear the twenty minutes described
Ask for the walk-through. It takes about three minutes on the telephone and settles most of the worry.
Ask what the hour covers — (954) 758-9861