Abstract

An invaluable companion for complementary and beauty therapists working with older people in care, this book offers helpful information and advice on practical issues that are often overlooked in training, including:

· Assessing older clients for appropriate treatments
· Communicating effectively with older clients, relatives and care staff
· Adapting treatments for older clients with particular health conditions, including dementia
· Working around beds, wheelchairs, walking frames and medical equipment
· Hygiene, safety and ethical considerations
· Guidance on using specific complementary therapies and techniques with older clients, including reflexology, aromatherapy and massage
· Common pitfalls and difficulties practitioners may encounter, offering encouragement and down-to-earth advice for tackling them.

With useful case examples and explanatory photographs throughout, this is an essential handbook for practitioners who have recently started working, or who are training to work with, older people in care, including in care homes, hospitals and in palliative care.

Sharon Tay is a beauty therapist and natural therapist who has worked in the industry for eighteen years. She specialises in health and beauty care for women of all age groups, particularly with older women residing in both nursing homes and private residences. She is a mother and a grandmother. Sharon lives in Lenah Valley, Tasmania and spends most of her leisure time in the garden or walking along the tracks of Mt Wellington and other bush tracks in southern Tasmania. She is the author of The Carer's Cosmetic Handbook: Simple Health and Beauty Tips for Older Persons, published by JKP.
Sharon is one of those rare people who instinctively understand the three basic needs of everyone: to grow, to be successful and to be appreciated, and she uses her experience to help other carers, and aspirants, make those needs better met in the elderly...She understands that if one can find what these needs mean to each person, life can be greatly improved, and she has prepared this text to share her wide experience with others.
Dr Alasdair Diarmid Ross, former Director of Public Health for Tasmania
In The Carer’s Cosmetic Handbook, Sharon Tay provides a most useful and informative guide for those caring for older people (and some younger ones too) who wish to provide simple beauty treatments. In this recent publication Complementary Therapies for Older People in Care, Sharon has gone a large step further, detailing the minutiae of setting up and providing a mobile beauty and complementary treatment service, suitable for an inexperienced practitioner going out on their own. With her accessible, conversational style, such a practitioner could feel that Sharon, with her depth of experience in caring for frail people, was right beside them, guiding them in the safe, respectful provision of treatments. The chapters on hygiene, sanitation, self-care and safety are very detailed, necessarily, as these important subjects cannot be over-emphasised. But what shines out of every page is Sharon’s deep compassion for those in care, and her wealth of experience. Fortunate indeed are those clients who have been the recipients of her care. This book will go a long way in encouraging less experienced practitioners to take on the challenge of providing caring treatment to "the forgotten ones" - those in care.
Dr Ann Miller, GP with a particular interest in complementary therapies, Victoria, Australia
This is an essential handbook for practitioners who have recently started working - or are training to work with - older people in care, including in care homes, hospitals and in palliative care.
International Therapist