Seniors need help, but they’re often left to fend for themselves. Over 8 million seniors get support from long term care services yearly. Support agencies aren’t always going to be around when seniors need their help, though. That’s why caregivers are teaming up to create a care community where their efforts can be shared to help seniors: Lotsa Helping Hands (LHH).
LOTSA HELPING HANDS TO THE RESCUE
LHH is a care organization system that lets caregivers form care communities to help out the people they love. With LHH, you’ll be able to have easy communication with your loved ones, your helpers, the other people in your community, and plan around obstacles to solve them as painlessly as possible.
How is this possible? Lotsa Helping Hands has a website, app, and, most importantly, a great community that’s ready for you to join. You’ll be able to deliver great care to your loved ones without having to pay a dime.
FEATURES
Where is LHH adding value to your care routine, though? In short, everywhere. Using Lotsa’s tools, you’ll be powerfully hooked into the cutting edge of providing care. You won’t need to worry about people you love being in need for lack of help.
CARE CALENDAR
The biggest feature that you’ll make the most use out of with Lotsa is the Calendar. With the Calendar, you’ll have very granular control over who is taking care of which aspect of your relative’s care on what day and for how long.
The potential of the care calendar is nearly limitless. You can easily put important events like:
- Doctor’s appointments
- Scheduled visits
- House cleanings
- Birthdays
- Recurring appointments
- Lunch dates
The calendar lets you assign who gets to do what when it comes to your relative’s care. If you think that one person on your care team would be a better fit for a given task than another, you can assign them based on their ability on the calendar.
EASY COMMUNICATION AND RELATIVE SUPPORT
Communicating with your relatives and the rest of their care team can often be a quagmire of emails, text messages, and other forms of communication that requires playing telephone. Lotsa removes the disorganization by locating all of the caregiving information into one single place. Seniors can view the information on Lotsa, too, allowing them to be an active participant in their care if they feel like they’re up to the task.
With the help of Lotsa’s communication and support systems, everyone will be on the same page about what they should be doing to support your loved ones. If someone in your care community is struggling, it’s also very easy to reach out and offer your support.
Small signals of support can uplift people more than you might think, and you’ll be perfectly enabled to offer your goodwill with Lotsa. After a fall or an illness, these small signals of support could uplift you, too. With Lotsa, there’s no limitation on who can provide support of this sort, so there’s no chance for anyone to start feeling isolated after they experience a loss of mobility or something similar.
CAREGIVER SUPPORT
Helpers have a lot to teach each other, but rarely do they have a place to exchange tips. Lotsa offers that place in the Helper forums, where helpers everywhere can speak with each other about what works, what doesn’t work, and why.
By enabling helper to helper communication, Lotsa lets everyone on your care team up their game and provide a higher quality of care to your relatives and loved ones. Learning from other helpers is also a great way of kindling relationships with others and forming broader caregiving communities that may help each other out in the future.
TRACK YOUR PROGRESS
Via Lotsa’s photo gallery and other progress tracking features, you can chronicle your care team’s successes and your relatives’ happiness over time. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, it might be worth taking a few pictures before using Lotsa so that your team can compare the night and day difference.
Tracking your progress is important because it’ll give you an undeniable record of how powerful well-organized care can be. Especially if you’re skeptical about having a central hub for caregiving, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the photo album’s chronicling of your increasing ability to organize care.
A CARE CALENDAR MAKES LIFE EASIER
The calendar is one of the core features of Lotsa that you’ll use to make your loved ones have a more comfortable life. Via the calendar, you can integrate concepts like meal calendars, medical calendars, social calendars, and other events so that your senior has a comprehensively attended to lifestyle.
Especially for core life functions like eating and getting medical attention, Lotsa enables your care team to make sure that the ball never gets dropped to the detriment of your relative. For seniors, Lotsa provides peace of mind—everything is scheduled and accounted for in an easy to understand way, so they won’t need to worry about gaps in coverage.
Often lifting the burden of anxiety about their care can massively improve the happiness and contentedness of seniors, which results in them needing less care and being more cheerful to their helpers.
NOT JUST FOR SENIORS
Seniors can become an empowered member of their care team and their community using Lotsa, but it’s also an extremely powerful tool for helpers, friends and family, and community volunteers looking to pitch in.
CAREGIVERS
Helpers using Lotsa get the advantage of having all their care duties located under one hood and with easy communications between members of the team. Likewise, helpers can directly communicate to seniors as frequently as they’d like to make sure that they don’t get lonely.
Horizontal communication from distinct caregiving groups is also possible with Lotsa. If the caregiving group responsible for providing meals is running late, they can drop a line to the helpers or family members that are currently with the senior to let them know. Likewise, seniors can communicate to their helpers that they’re in a spot of trouble and might need assistance sooner than scheduled.
FRIENDS AND FAMILY
Friends and family are also some of the primary users of Lotsa because it gives them the ability to have a clear line of communications with their caregiving team, their senior, and other members of the caregiving community that may be able to offer them emotional support or technical tips on senior care.
Friends and family are core to using Lotsa effectively, as they’ll be the ones making the most use of the calendar and progress tracking photo albums—who wouldn’t want a lot of pictures with their smiling senior?
VOLUNTEERS
Community volunteers can also get their hands dirty using Lotsa. If anyone in the community is looking for a chance to pitch in, they’ll find plenty on the calendar or in the forums. Volunteers can fill gaps in helper coverage, help friends and family understand their senior’s challenges a bit more, and elevate themselves with the joy of community service.
Often, volunteers can give a new face for your senior to befriend and interact with. Integrating more volunteers into your family’s caregiving strategy is a great way to keep your senior’s life a bit more dynamic, which is good for their health.
If your family is looking for a volunteer opportunity, Lotsa will provide you with a limitless number within your broader care community. You’ll be able to join with other members of the website to volunteer to make seniors’ lives easier, happier, and healthier. Volunteers can organize their efforts just like helpers, meaning that everyone is fully up to date about who will be providing what service on what day.
HOW TO GET STARTED
With all these features and people that are involved in Lotsa, you might be getting the impression that it’s a complicated system to get rolling. Lotsa is incredibly simple to use, and to prove it, here are the steps you’ll need to take to get your community up and running within ten minutes:
- Sign up on LotsaHelpingHands.com
- Create a community or join a community
- Start adding items to the calendar
- Introduce yourself on the message boards
- Start tracking your progress with the photo gallery
- Start using LHH to coordinate care
- Coordinate with other members as needed
NEVER GO WITHOUT HELP
Lotsa Helping Hands is an excellent choice if you’re looking for a way to coordinate your senior’s care. With Lotsa, you’ll get a central platform that you, your friends and family, seniors, and helpers can collaborate on to make sure that there aren’t any gaps in care. Given that Lotsa is free, what do you have to lose by signing up and making a community today?