Basic human needs
- Physical: food, water, oxygen, elimination, clothing, shelter, activity (sensory and motor), sex, physical exercise, and rest.
What is sensory: using your senses such as sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.
What is motor activity: small motor meaning using the hand and eye coordination. For example, when you paint play an instrument, or do beading.
Gross motor meaning: involving the big muscles in arms, legs, and torso muscles. For example, walking, and running.
- Emotional: Love, importance, productivity, adequacy.
Productivity: work or creativity
- Social: Identification, education, recreation/play, and religion.
Religion may be replaced by people who do not believe in religion but are spiritual or people who believe in nothing at all.
As a caregiver you must always remember the following: there are 3 angles to a triangle and all 3 are, necessary for healing: the one does not exist without the other. This means that a patient may have a leg, that needs to mend but without emotional/spiritual and social support the physical does not happen.
Very often people make the mistake of only taking care of the physical and forget about the other angles of the triangle: emotional/spiritual and social. As a caregiver, you are expected to help them with all three angles.
How will you do this?
The physical aspect of healing will be all your duties and responsibilities laid out by the healthcare professionals and the course content that you will learn. The emotional and spiritual aspects: you will make yourself available to listen to the client. You are not expected to give advice but merely listen when they need to talk to you. You may help them to place an object like a symbol or their religion where they can see it. You may also be required to speak to the pastor of their church to visit them. You may also be expected to always assure the patient that you are available if they need to speak to anybody. You should keep the conversation private to yourself and never share what the patient has told you in confidence.
Social: no man is an island, and this is true about everybody that lives on planet Earth. Everybody needs interaction either with family or friends. If a family member or friend never comes to visit you should ask the client if you may contact a family member or friend. If distance is a problem, you may offer to help them connect online with a device. If they for example love to go to a sermon and cannot attend, you may ask for the sermon to be recorded for your client. You may also make yourself available for the client to speak to if there are no family members or friends.