Strategies for helping your loved one to use their bed

Bramble Home Care takes great pride in being able to offer the best-tailored home help in Gloucester, provided by highly trained home carers who know the best strategies for assisting your loved one to maintain the utmost mobility and independence while living in their own abode. In this piece, we are focussing on the various ways in which you can help your loved one to make best use of their bed. This is an important topic for advanced dementia sufferers who are no longer able to move in and out of bed unaided, as well as for those sufferers who have developed mobility problems in general.

There are various potentially useful strategies for helping the person with dementia to move from lying down on the bed to sitting on the edge. You may use a 'rising' gesture - providing a visual cue - while saying "Get up, please", followed by "Sit on the edge, please" - a goal-based request. You could ensure that the person is first lying with their knees bent up, before asking them to look at you and reach for either your hand or the edge of the bed.

If you need your loved one to move from sitting on the edge of the bed to lying down, you may ask them to "Lie down, please", slapping the pillows to make a noise that serves as a sound cue. Encouraging the person to lie down along the bed's length could be done by saying to them, "Here's the pillow", helping them to feel it - a touch cue.

When your loved one is required to move across the bed, you could combine the instruction "Move across here, please" with a sliding gesture, which provides a directional cue. Guidance can be offered through touch cues, and a slide sheet can be used to assist the person in moving their hips across.

Finally, another part of the right home help in Gloucester is assisting your loved one to move along the bed's edge when they need to do so. You can assist them in this by saying "Move along, please" along with a gesture as a directional cue. Another potentially effective method here is to sit away from the person and encourage them to move towards you by patting the bed, saying "Come and sit beside me."

Various means exist of potentially helping the person with dementia to move around, and you will need to take your time and reassure them as they attempt to make such major changes of position. Contact Bramble Home Care now to learn about how our own home carers can provide the most suitable home help in Gloucester with your loved one's everyday activities. 

To access more information on this topic, visit this page of the Alzheimer’s Society website: http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/download_info.php?fileID=1111.

Editor’s Note: Bramble Home Care (http://www.bramblehomecare.co.uk) are represented by the search engine advertising and digital marketing specialists Jumping Spider Media. Email: info@jumpingspidermedia.co.uk or call: +44 (0)20 3070 1959 / +34 952 783 637.