A New Growing Option for Senior Living
Are you considering a residential care home for yourself or an aging parent? If so, there’s a growing trend in senior living that you should definitely explore before committing to a big-box assisted living or independent living facility. These non-traditional senior care residences still offer all the perks, but the environment is tailored to resemble in-home care by balancing privacy verses companionship and help verses autonomy to your specific desire within any given moment. Read on to learn more about this exciting option for seniors.
Small House Senior Living
Areas like Asheville NC are seeing a rapidly rising demand for senior care that focuses on quality and delivery of care, not facility size. The result is smaller personal care homes, such as Silverbell Homestead.
These are residences tailored to the unique needs and demands of seniors. They offer shelter and services for meals, housekeeping and laundry, daily living assistance, medication supervision, wellness checks, and so forth. It’s an environment designed for individuals wanting assurances of help and safety without the need for around the clock skilled care.
Most assisted living facilities and residential care facilities operate under the same state licensing regulations in terms of care services. Of course, this is applicable based on each facility’s unique operations and program offerings.
In most states, personal care homes aren’t permitted to provide skilled nursing services without the presence of an RN or LPN. Instead, the focus of these much smaller and personalized facilities is to be truly assistive and supportive to each resident’s unique needs, including:
• Help with activities of daily living, such as toileting, incontinence care, dressing, bathing.
• Enable good nutrition and timely medication routines.
• Offer shelter with safety, privacy, community, and independence intertwined
• Offer opportunities for engagement, socialization, therapeutics, entertainment, and community involvement
The Vast Appeal Of Small Personal Care
California has seen explosive movement in smaller residential care offerings since the 1970s. Such smaller, non-institutionalized offerings have helped to solve an overload crisis in traditional care facilities for dependent care groups with mental, physical, and/or age-related disabilities. It’s an idea that’s taken off in places like Nevada, Florida, and South Carolina.
Aside from helping to attend to the overflow of individuals in need of help minus continual skilled care, the appeal of small personal care homes is so large because of its fluidity. The care model moves with the adult as their intermittent needs and wants vary day by day and potentially become less autonomous over time.
The resident maintains complete freedom of choice and normalcy in what, how, and when they go about their day. Yet, if desired, they have assistive and interaction choices available to them. It’s these freedoms that separate small care from institutionalized care, and it can make all the difference in a resident feeling confident and at-home with their living arrangements.
For those with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, the model of care from a small personal care home can be greatly beneficial. Unlike institutionalization, the resident has close supervision from just one or two staff members. There’s also significantly less interaction with other distressed residents to set off reactionary behaviors. It results in less anxiety and stress for the person already dealing with the uncertainties and insecurities of dementia.
Lastly, the cost of smaller care homes makes an astounding difference to seniors on a fixed income. The cost of a private small housing living arrangement is about half of what skilled facilities charge for a shared room, and they’re usually less costly than big-box assisted living communities offering extravagant amenities built into the cost that the resident many not even want to utilize.