As an administrator of a personal home care facility, assisted living facility or adult family homes, you might have seen signs of skin breakdown in most if not all of your clients. Old people and incapacitated individuals stand the highest risks of getting skin breakdowns. This is because they rarely move or they spend the better part of their time fastened on a chair or in bed.
Your facility then stands quite a number of chances of occurrence of the risk – skin breakdown. Luckily, there are a number of ways that occurrence of skin breakdown can be prevented and consequently avoided. Below is an exploratory of some of the ways.
Ways To Avoid Skin Breakdown
- Massage using moisturizing lotion – The skin is the largest organ of the human body and no matter how aged, the skin and its cells are well alive. Regularly applying massage using moisturizing lotion will rejuvenate your skin cells. This will give your skin a richer look and will go way ahead in preventing breakdown.
- Healthy eating and healthy living – Dieting is one issue that needs to be looked into to avoid skin breakdown. As a facility administrator, you will have to ensure that proper diet is served to all your clients. You should also encourage them to practice healthy living including taking petty exercises. This will help avoid skin breakdown in your facility.
- Personal hygiene – Among the best ways of ensuring prevention of skin breakdown in a residential care facility is to sensitize the clients on the need for personal hygiene. Maintaining a dry, clean environment in practically all areas of the skin is key to ensuring that skin breakdown is prevented.
- Protect skin pressure points – Skin pressure points are prone to breakdown and to avoid this, pillows should be used. This will ensure that the skin pressure points are supported and do not have to shoulder all the weight which is what normally leads to skin breakdown at the pressure points.
Some signs of skin breakdown that should trigger action are excessively dry or shiny skin, discoloration of the skin, cracks, blisters and even redness of the skin. It is highly important that positions are changed regularly and skin condition checked at least twice a day. Signs and symptoms should be taken seriously and treated.
Remember, none of your clients needs to suffer skin breakdown if you take proper preventive measures.
