My 83 year old mom is currently in a SNF after a 3-month stint in rehab after a stroke. She is utterly miserable and desperately wants to go home. Her apartment is completely wheelchair accessible. The only issue is that she currently needs two people to transfer her from bed to wheelchair. She needs 24/7 care and obviously I can't hire two aides to be there at the same time to do the transfers. I know that there are Hoyer lifts that can be operated by one person. That seems to be the only way she can go home. Does anyone have any experience with a home aide who can operate one of these alone?
We did get quite a lot of training and practice using it while my dad was at spinal cord injury rehab (and he was there about a month). Both OT and PT helped us learn how to use it for getting in and out of bed, into the wheelchair, and lowered onto the commode. When my dad came home from rehab, the OT and PT visits we had at home included making sure use of the Hoyer was going OK.
Basically, it's not hard but you want to be trained on it by a pro.
There are times when I have to tell the aides to pay better attention as they are busy looking at the remote and not seeing either the bar pressing into mom or her feet getting caught
Thankfully, mom has been accepting of it, but it does give me pause to see her hanging in it until she's over her bed