How I Built an Efficient and Affordable Home-Care System for My 92-Year-Old Mother
Elderly in rural still has many gaps in effective implementation. In the current scenario, having an efficient home-care system can be extremely beneficial and helpful.
About two months ago, my mother, who is 92 years old, fell in the bathroom and broke her pelvic bone. I live in the rural town of Balaghat in MP, and to get a simple X-ray done was a nightmare.
We called the local and they sent a ramshackle . How an old Maruti Omni van got permission to ply as an ambulance is anybody's guess. Even a passenger would feel sick, and his/her bones would be rattled in that ambulance while going over the pot-holed roads of Balaghat.
The driver of the also doubled up as the paramedic, and his callous and non-empathetic attitude almost broke my mother's heel. He almost threw my mother on the stretcher! Most of the ambulances in rural places are like that, with hardly any facility to help the patient. I had to use an old saree to tie my mother to the stretcher so that her broken pelvis did not shake very much.
At the hospital, after a good deal of arguing, we got her X-ray done quite quickly. Otherwise, it takes forever to get it done. Since the pelvic bone was slightly fractured, the doctor advised complete bed rest and told us to take her home. In pelvic fracture cases, there is no surgery needed, but just plain bed rest so that the broken bone heals by itself. That is also the reason why I did not take her to Pune for .
We brought her home and were immediately confronted by the stark reality of who would take care of her nursing needs. We tried to locate nursing care in Balaghat but were unsuccessful. Even the hospitals do not provide that facility.
The relatives of patients do that in most of the rural hospitals.
We have a few women in the house who do the housework and cook. We requested them to help in changing diapers, but they refused and also threatened to quit their job. Therefore, my wife and my daughter changed the diapers until we got a mausi from Pune.
Thus, after great difficulty and searching, we got a 24-hour help (who is completely illiterate and has almost no training as a ) from Pune. Even this little help relieved our emotional and .
Searching the internet and talking to my friends, I have finally been able to convert my mother's room into a facility. This includes an adjustable with air mattress and a specially fabricated small which can navigate the narrow passages of the house and can go into the bathroom. I feel I could get all this done because of our resources and ability to spend time searching for solutions on the internet. Most of the rural population does not have this luxury.
Another tragedy in rural areas is that no wants to do a visit. No matter how ill or old the patient is, they insist that he/she be brought to the or their .
I was able to get a person who was not an M.B.B.S. doctor but could administer saline or do basic dressing for bed sores. That offered partial relief.
Very frequently, I have seen that in rural, and also in urban areas, the missing ingredient in is good facilities. Putting a patient in the (whether he or she is terminally ill or suffering from non-life-threatening ailments) means endless headaches for relatives, who have to stay in the hospital, look after the of the , and run continuously to get and . Besides, the charge exorbitant amounts for surgeries and for lots of unnecessary tests performed on the .
Thus, I felt that reasonable home-care might be a better alternative. I was greatly helped in this experiment by my brother, who is an orthopedic surgeon in India. He constantly advised us on the basic care, and telemedicine by him really helped us.
From him, I also learned that the most important need for elderly patients is pain management, and taking immediate care of bedsores and other physical ailments.
10 days after her accident, my mother developed bed sores. Since no doctor would come for , we did the dressing ourselves. The non-MBBS doctor showed us—in quite a shoddy manner—how to do the dressing. By talking to my doctor friends and my brother in India, we were finally able to get a good combination of dressing creams and materials and did the dressing ourselves.
After teaching the 24-hour help, she started doing the dressing properly. She was also told to make my mother sleep periodically on her side so that aeration took place in the bed sore area. Getting an air mattress bed also helped.
All these things helped in healing the bedsores, and after nearly two months, they were completely cured.
Bed sores are a major problem for elderly patients, and if they can be cured, then a major battle is won.
The pain management required a little extra care. Most of the pain-relieving medicines are very powerful, with serious side-effects.
My brother in India would suggest the medicines (after consulting the experts in geriatric medicine in his hospital) and we would look them up on the internet. Those were powerful medicines, including opioids, which relieved the pain initially, but had serious side effects, affecting the brain and the digestive system.
With the onset of dementia, as in my mother's case, these medicines were more pain-givers than pain-relievers! Finally, we tapered them off and gave her simple pain relievers like paracetamol and brufen. The removal of strong painkillers helped improve the general condition of my mother, though the irreversible dementia is incurable.
Now, the 24-hour help changes my mother's diapers, takes her to the toilet in a wheelchair, gives her a sponge bath every day, and head bath once in 10-15 days. She also puts oil on her body and massages her on most days. After the sponge bath, she puts cream on her body. The combination of oil and cream keeps the skin moist.
Dry skin in old people is a major medical problem and leads to scratching and itching and creation of new wounds.
Since I am an amateur homeopathic practitioner, I sometimes administer medicines which also help her now and then.
Thus some of the lessons learned in this process have been to make the patient as physically comfortable as possible. By giving as few medicines as possible, and letting nature take care of the body, I feel an elderly patient can have comfortable final days.
The majority of times in rural settings, when is not available, the patient goes to poorly equipped rural hospitals or sometimes transfers to an urban one.
We at are an organization committed towards the cause of making in the comfort of the home easy and affordable. We do this by providing good quality medical equipment for or at best prices. We also provide trained nurses and attendants which have passed our rigorous hiring standards and have had their backgrounds and verified by our .
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