As your parent or loved one begins to age, you may need to help assist them with medication management. This will likely be the case when they enter an assisted living facility as you take them to different doctors that will give different prescriptions for different ailments.
You will need to pass these onto the care facility, so they know proper distribution, etc. Here are some quick tips to help aid you in managing those different medications:
- Review each “batch” of medications with each doctor: Going with your loved one as the see their different doctors and specialists will give you the opportunity to download the different medications they might be on.
- Ask each doctor about different drug interactions and share other prescriptions from other doctors: There can often be some very vital drug interactions/reactions if a doctor is unaware of what another doctor has prescribed. Always keep your loved one’s prescription list up to date with each doctor/specialist they see. Also, make sure the assisted living facility also keeps this up to date.
- Read medication labels: this can be important with different medications requiring food or to be taken at a certain time of day.
- Understand the potential side effects of a drug and identify them as quickly as possible.
- Monitor your loved one’s ability to take the medication: Some elderly loved one’s might forget or other’s might purposely not take a drug. You will need to monitor that they are taking proper dosage and not self-prescribing their amounts.
- Organize, organize, organize: Each year there are new gadgets and technologies to help you organize your loved one’s medication. It’s important to keep up with these and use them if you believe they will help organizing the meds.
It isn’t easy to handle the medication of a loved one but the more you prepare and organize, the safer everybody else will be.
