Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello, my name is Deborah Stone and this is Alex Ingram, my colleague. Together we have
set up My Ageing Parent, a website which aims to help you help your elderly parents by providing
all the information you might need in one place.
Today we'd like to tell you a little bit about safety in the bathroom. Bathrooms for all
of us are dangerous places. They are wet, they are slippery, and there are baths and
showers to climb in and out of. My own mother managed to break her pelvis in three places
just by trying to open the shower door, so I have personal experience of just how dangerous
the bathroom can be. We'd like to share with you some of our ideas on how to keep your
elderly parents safe in the bathroom. Well, I think the most important thing in
the bathroom is to make sure your parents are going to keep balanced at all times, so
handrails will be really important and you can put them around the toilet, around the
shower and around the bath, just anywhere where you think there is any danger. But it
is also important to make sure that the handrails and their grips are at the height your parent
needs, and not, obviously, what you think they need. So test them out and make sure
that they are actually working. They also need access into the bath so a bath
step might be important and a seat in the bath and shower will also be helpful. Floors
in bathrooms get pretty slippery, so a bathmat will be an obvious way of preventing the floor
getting too wet. Choose a bathmat that is not too thick, otherwise they may trip over
it, and one with a non-slip back as well, because that will be important.
In terms of actually using the bath and shower, you can get stickers that go on the bottom
that will make them non-slip which will also be useful. Overall, I think it's good to make
sure the bathroom is well lit, and in that way it will become a safer place for your
parents to use. Besides showers and baths, the medicine cabinet
is also an area of danger in the bathroom. I would suggest you keep it locked and make
sure your parents can access it, of course. But also what's inside the medicine cabinet
is important, in the sense that they could be full of lots of out-of-date medicines,
and medicines that are no longer used, so ensure it is cleared out regularly. We normally
get medicines from pharmacies and they come with very small labels and I have difficulty
reading them myself. So, you may want to re-label medicines with large writing and clearly state
the dosage and what it is for. In that way your parents shouldn't get confused. This
wasn't quite the case with Deborah's Mum who managed to give her pet dog her sleeping tablets
and put him to sleep for 48 hours! So, one other suggestion that comes up from this is
to make sure you keep your pet's medicines away from your own medicines. Pill boxes on
a daily basis: stocking a pill box for one day's dose, it can be kept in the medicine
cabinet, and in that way it can be very easy for your parent to ensure they have the right
dosage of all the medicines they need, and you can keep a check on it.
So, there are some tips for safety in the bathroom. If you want to know more have a
look at our website: myageingparent.com where you'll find a lot more information. Thank
you.