Keeping your elderly loved ones safe is one of the priorities of senior home safety. Even if you’re caring for a stranger, or someone as part of your job, you’re likely constantly looking out for their best interest and trying to see potential hazards, so that you can address them and eliminate them. While you’re noticing the risks that are posed within the bathroom, around the kitchen, and even the clutter that may fill up a room, there is one risk to senior home safety that doesn’t get enough attention. That is germs.
Germs can hide out in a wide range of places and being that elderly individuals tend to have a weaker immune system, it can become a serious situation, leading to more serious health problems in the future. The best thing that you can do to help keep the elderly individual safe is to understand where germs are most common, how you can protect yourself (and how the senior can protect herself) and those secret places that germs hide out in.
Germs absolutely love hiding out in places that we don’t think much about. They can get onto our hands, move into the air when disturbed, and cause a number of potential health problems. Below are a few of those ‘secret’ places they like to hang out in.
Sponges. While we use sponges to clean the dishes and all sorts of place, they are some of the dirtiest and most disgusting places in the entire house. Did you know that sponges can harder germs and other bacteria that come off of food? Even though you ring them out, they are still holding all those germs inside them.
Vacuum cleaners. While you’re helping to keep the house clean by vacuuming, you’re also allowing germs to escape from the unit every time that you turn it on. In order to make the home safer when vacuuming, choose a vacuum with a HEPA filter that will trap almost every germ or allergen that gets sucked in.
Doorknobs. The moment that you touch a doorknob, you’re touching millions of germs. When you’re cleaning, how often to you tend to clean the doorknobs, especially with germ killing compounds? Probably not often. Few of us ever do, yet when you think about it, doorknobs are harbors for these germs.
Now that you realize where germs like to hide, you’ll be able to improve senior home safety and help keep the elderly individual in your life a bit safer from too many common household germs.
