A recent blog caught our eye on www.carehome.co.uk, if you’re interested we’ve included the link at the bottom of our blog should you wish to read the whole article. It highlights the interesting reduction in falls in a care home, by utilising an innovative lighting scheme.
The scheme came about as a result of the care home manager noticing in the annual falls report, that quite a few were attributable to residents getting up to use the toilet in the night. Falls commonly occurred because residents became confused when they woke, and often forgot to switch on the light or press their alarm bell for help.
To help reduce the number of falls the care home introduced the “Light The Night” scheme to enable residents to use the bathroom by themselves during the night. The scheme, devised by the care home staff, uses illuminated light switches, footprints, walking frames and toilets, to help residents safely navigate the journey from bedroom to bathroom. Through providing motion sensitive illumination and luminescent highlighting, the care home was able to reduce the number of night-time falls.
Solving problems for people with reduced mobility through innovative solutions is something we will always tip our hat to and this is a particularly good example. The actual devices can be inexpensive and simple to source, try an Amazon search for “illuminated toilet bowl” for instance.
On the subject of lighting, we thought we’d take the opportunity to highlight a little known optional extra available on our walk-in baths and power baths. Chromotherapy is an alternative medicine using coloured lights to adjust mood and wellbeing. Like many alternative medicine’s it is yet to be approved by mainstream science, nonetheless it has many supporters who swear by the beneficial effects it can produce.
Chromotherapy can be added to our walk-in baths, suitable for private residences, and to our power baths, suitable for high intensity use in care homes as well as private residences. If you’re running a care home and would like to cater to all tastes and preferences amongst your residents you might want to consider specifying Chromotherapy on your new baths when you refurbish the bathroom.
As promised, here’s a link to the above referenced Blog:
https://www.carehome.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1587505/care-home-residents-with-dementia-shown-the-way-with-illuminous-footprints-and-loos
At Absolute Mobility, we’ve installed many bathrooms for care homes, designed around the needs of the users. If you own or manage a care home and are planning to refurbish your bathrooms in the near future, please get in touch to discuss your requirements. Please call us on 0800 29 22 110.
