March 10–16 is Patient Safety Awareness Week. At Overture Home Care, we’re taking advantage of this week to shine a spotlight on safety awareness for independent older adults and the home care caregivers who help them maintain that independence, keeping them from becoming patients anytime soon.

Each new year brings advances in senior health and support technology, but also advances in the technology and methods of the scammers and identity thieves targeting our senior loved ones. As they are less familiar with modern technology, seniors are often the targets of fraudsters seeking to exploit unprotected information.

Our older loved ones are particularly at risk from the scams and frauds initiated by those emails, as many seniors control readily available funds, trust institutions that appear legitimate, and have little knowledge of technology and current scams. According to the FBI Elder Fraud information page our elderly population suffers more than $3 billion in losses to fraud annually.

In our last post on Breast Cancer Awareness Month we talked about the dizzying array of medications that can make organizing cancer care for the elderly a cause of anxiety not just for patients, but for their family caregivers as well.

In 1996, the National Safety Council (NSC) established June as National Safety Month with the goal of increasing public awareness of the leading safety risks and decreasing the number of accidental injuries and deaths at homes and the workplace.

Remember back in December when we suggested that holiday visits were a good time to take a look around your older loved ones’ homes and talk to them about the support they might need to continue living independently? We mentioned a number of red flags to look for, but here’s something we didn’t mention: the need for deep cleaning and decluttering.

Most of us can benefit from a seasonal tidy-up. But for older people and people with health or mobility concerns, clean and clutter-free living spaces and walkways aren’t just a spring-time thing. They are essential to independent life.

Here's a New Year's resolution we're going to add to our list, and hope that you do as well: visit your older loved ones, spend quality time in their bathrooms, and take careful note of anything that needs to be updated or added to improve their safety.