Fall Prevention with Beth Deems
Beth Deems at Mission Health Care discusses fall prevention, one of the best things we as caregivers can do for our senior parents. And while it may not be possible to prevent all falls, mitigating that risk is so important. One in five falls results in a serious injury, such as broken bone or head injury, according to the Center for Disease Control.
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*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
This is a special presentation of Answers for Elders with Careage. Well, welcome to the program again everyone. We are very excited today to have a lovely lady sitting across from me by the name of Beth Deems. Now, Beth Deems is part of Careage, which is a parent company to Mission Healthcare and Bellevue, and she is the community liaison of the facility and she’s going to share with us all about fall prevention. Beth, welcome to the program. Thank you, Suzanne. It’s really nice to be here. You know, I have heard so many great things about the carriage properties. I know you guys own several. Would you give me kind of a little bit of a background on your on your facilities? Sure, we own mission healthcare at Bellevue, which is a skilled nursing facility, as well as carriage home health, and then we have Patriots Glen, which is an assisted living in memory care facility. Wow, so you really run the gambit. So you could come in as an assisted living, you know, resident, and pretty much once you do that you can be assured that you’ve got a continuum of care, which we’ll talk about in another show, for the rest of your life. Absolutely, that’s amazing. So how just tell me a little bit about mission healthcare. How long of you guys been in business? We’ve been in business for quite a while. The building was previously owned by Sun Health Care. And we do skilled nursing, so we do long term care, short term rehab, we can do respite and as well as a hospice or end of life care. Wow, wow, so you really see a lot of you know, especially with mission healthcare, you’re more of a skilled care, skilled nursing or what we would call a rehab facility. And explain the process of rehab. What is that? Well, the process of rehab is let’s say a senior goes into the hospital for either a chronic illness or maybe a fall, since we’re talking about fall prevention right may break either a hip, a pelvis, a shoulder and arm and they need therapy to get stronger and get better to go back to their previous living situation, which might be home, an apartment, might be with family, might be an assisted living. So the hospital would contact us, give us their information, we would accept that patient. They would come from the hospital to our inpatient rehabing where they can receive physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy and nursing care. That’s amazing. So, so in your facility you probably have different types of personnel, like, say, physical therapist, occupational therapist, different sort of skilled professionals. Is that correct? Correct? And we have a huge gym with all types of equipment to treat all different types of illnesses. We’ve actually treated a patient with what’s called Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which is caused by a virus that can leave people paralyzed. Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. So, Beth, obviously, if you’re rehabbing from an accident, that’s the last place you want to be, and so I want to talk about specifically. I mean, if you have to have an accident, it’s wonderful that you’re there and and I think that’s amazing, but I’m you know, there’s a lot of times we can prevent accidents and I think that this is something that’s really important that we’re talking about fall prevention today and it there’s some things that we can do right now today, while our parents are still healthy, that can minimize the risks of falls. So I’m curious about what is the most common reason for a senior, for example, to that contributes to falls. For the scene for seniors, a lot of it is balanced and gait. You know, maybe they’ve got some more thritis that is painful, so it’s making them start to change the way they walk, which impacts their balance. Where they might have something called peripheral neuropathy where they have numbness and their feet, and your feet are a big part of your balance, your toes, her feet. So if you don’t have feeling in them, that makes it difficult to have good balance. And obviously that can be affected by stroke, can be affected by heart diabetes, diabetes, different types of conditions for sure. And then you’ve got medications. They might be on a medication that when they stand up quickly it makes them dizzy. Oh that can contribute. And then also just their environment. Personally, my mom fell in the kitchen and broke her hip because of a throw rug in the kitchen. Her foot got caught in it and twisted and she went down. So you don’t want any kind of throw rugs. And then, of course just some chronic conditions that contribute to weakness again or difficulty in ambulating or walking. One of the things that people can look for is is is your parent or the senior furniture walking, hanging on the walking, hanging onto walls to walk to steady them? That is a sign right there that you need intervention. Absolutely. And now that it’s springtime, I know how important in many cases with our seniors that having a garden is to them their yard. A while ago, this is a couple of years ago, I was given the preview to a story that just broke my heart. There was a woman in that had gone out to her trustee garden every day with her little walker and all she had was little paver stones in the ground, but she had a bunch of overgrown ivy because if it wasn’t very well kept and the leg of her Walker got caught in the Ivy and as she started to pull it away, she lost her balance, fell over, couldn’t get up, couldn’t get the Walker back up. She laid there for like two hours. So it’s you know, one of the things that we need to understand what Beth is saying, is not only inside the furniture walking, but what are they doing outside? Watch for walkways, watch for you know, take the paver stones out of the yard and put a concrete pad out. The other thing decks outside. Specially with this weather that we’ve been having, there’s a lot of slick surfaces out there and very, very much that we need to pay attention as much inside as outside. And it’s very easy to have someone come and build a ramp. Yeah, and also raised flower beds so that they don’t have to be bending down to the ground. And also there are other things you can put in place, like what I call the lifeline button. Yeah, so that and those will go quite a ways outside so that when you hit that button, if that patient were to fall and right help, they can hit that button and get help. Yes, and those are relatively inexpensive. Usually they adjust them based on your income and they’re really great safety measure to give the children of their parents some comfort in knowing they can get help immediately and not lay there for ten hours. Yes, and on a porch situation or anything like that, there’s actually non slip tread that you can lay down that’s glued down that can help in that area as well. The point is making sure that just that you do a survey and your parents home. So let’s talk about prevention and fall prevention, Beth, because you are a master. And by the way, everyone, before we go into that this we are talking to Beth teams. She is with carriages, mission healthcare and Bellevue. They are is skilled nursing and Rehab facility and she is a community leading as line. So when you call the facility, she is the person that you ask for. So tell us how falls can be present prevented. Well, number one, make sure that the pay the senior has good shoes on, that they’re not shuffling around in slippers that don’t have heels on the back that they could easily trip. Make sure there are no throw rugs in the house or even outside that they could trip on, that there are no slippery surfaces, and also talk to the to the senior, talk to your mom or dad and say hey, are you having any trouble? Sometimes they don’t like to admit it, but if you really ask those questions and you really watch them for the furniture walking, for a shuffling gate, a change in their gate or they get up and they have to grab something because they’re a little dizzy. Making sure when they go to the doctor that you talk about the medications they’re now learning that it’s more important to take medications away than to keep seniors on all these medications, because they can really cause some issues with falling and sometimes they’re just not really necessary. Sure, sure, and and the other thing I’m sure that, like everyone, is take a look at the environment. Everyone clutter is an invitation for Falling. So I know that all kinds of knick knacks, probably maybe out on your parents are loved ones, you know, mantle and coffee table and things like that, but any kind of knick knack thing like that can fall get in the path and you know, and of their moving around, and also a lot of seniors like to keep everything around them and so that can make it difficult for them to navigate with a walk or something that needs a wider hallway. Yes, so obviously I’m going to move into the most obvious place in the house, the bathroom. I think. Isn’t it like seventy five percent of falls happen in the home and in the bathroom. You probably get a lot of patients coming to your facility who have fallen in the bathtub or bath shower. HMM, and there are lots of ways to prevent that. Number one, getting therapy involved. They can come out and do a home assessment and see where you could put hand rails to assist that senior. Also there are bedside commodes that can be put over the toilet so they have hand rights to get up and down, and you can do shower benches in the bathtub or in the shower so they can be seated there, handheld shower wands so that they can sit during the shower. There are lots of things you can do in the bathroom to help them be safer, you know, and it’s not that difficult. Last year I broke my ankle and so obviously I couldn’t stand up in the shower. I had a shower chair. My wonderful husband put a little handheld shower thing and actually I kept it. I like it. And you know, Suzanne. That’s so funny because the same thing happened to me. I have a foot surgery and I had yeah, and weight bearing, and boy is that hard. I the first time we had a low toilet, I literally fell onto this one is amazing and it’s just one little simple thing that can happen. So it’s not just about, you know, oh aging parents that are that are starting to faulter. This is a kind of stuff that, even when your parents are really still independent, these kind of precautions should be definitely taken care of and and you know, proper grab bars should go up. You know, take a look at the bathroom mobility, just the environment, because again, that’s a really big place where a lot of people want to put up throw a rug down on the bathroom tile floor and as much as we think it’s pretty and it feels good on your foot because it’s a cold tile surface, it’s important that we pulled those and it’s a simple thing to do. The bedside commode. You can get them on Amazon for like twenty five dollars exactly. Not An expensive fix right and and you know it’s peace of mind for you because as you’re going into your parents, you know bedroom and area, you’re going to be seeing all different types of you know, the bedroom to the bathroom. Seniors notoriously get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Obviously their bladders can’t hold it as long, so you’re going to see a lot more activity going back and forth. And of course there’s the aspect of the concern about falling in that area. To and make sure there’s a night light on, because low light situations are much more difficult for seniors and can also cause falls. Exactly exactly. So, Beth, how do we reach you? I have a cell phone number which is two thousand and six nine three and two two thousand eight hundred and seventy three, and I also have an email which is BethD@missionhealthcare.com. Beth, it is so great to have you in the program. Thank you so much, Suzanne. Really enjoyed it. This has been a special presentation of answers for elders with carriage. For more information for carriage, go to Careage.com. That’s Careage.com.
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Originally published April 15, 2017