Aging Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Stop -Before Starting Geriatric Care Management Business – Do a Competition Survey

July 12, 2018

If you are thinking of starting private geriatric care management, a competition survey is critical to decide if you can make a profit in this business

You are surveying who your competition is in the geographic area you want to serve. You are discovering if you can achieve market share in the area you choose to serve.

You want to create a survey that tracks the individual care manager’s in your services area, and find out what their hourly fee is, do they now include homecare, what geriatric care management services does each GCM offer.

This will also tell you if the local market is too saturated for your new business to compete with the other care management agencies. It will test whether you can make a profit- can you make money, pay your bills, actually go to the next step while doing good?

Fewer businesses are failing in 2018 for many reasons. One is the tendency of would-be entrepreneurs to evaluate business opportunities more carefully before taking the plunge, by doing a competition survey. Potential company founders are more selective than they used to be. This means fewer marginal companies – businesses whose products are not needed or whose markets are already being served by other businesses – are being formed. As a result, the average American company is stronger and more likely to survive than it once was. This means doing a competition survey to find out if your product care management is really needed in your market and are too many geriatric care management competitors, in your area for you to successfully compete as a new business.

Learn how to do your market assessment and competition survey ( or secret shopper) in the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition and discover whether you have enough customers in your area to start your care management business. Don’t Guess and fail.

6 Activities for a Care Manager to Bring Intellectual Quality of life to Older People?

July 9, 2018

Care Manager Nina Herndon, the national expert of elder quality of life, cites in her chapter on Quality of Life, in Handbook of Geriatric Care Management a quote from the aging visionary Bill Thomas MD in his book, “What Are Old People For” .Thomas says the plague of so many elders,

especially in nursing homes is- loneliness, helplessness, and boredom because their environment is empty of companionship, intimacy, self-direction and meaningful activity. Care Managers can fill this void with quality of life. One way to do this is

Intellectual Quality of Life activities that engage older person mentally

Hobbies
Learning
Brain aerobics
any form of creativity

Here are 6 ideas for seniors who live at home or in an institution.

For seniors who are independent.

For seniors who wish to travel again but need support to arrange a trip-Work with a senior travel agency to have the elder plan a trip that the elder would love to take but never did. Arrange for senior to take a class on planning travel and to plan the trip Help them go on line

Games checkers dominos, puzzles, simple card games with a deck of cards with whales on them if they like the sea or more complicated games like bridge. Join local games” meet up” on parlor games Here is an example where I live.
Help client join a local book club with the kind of literature he likes to read (non-fiction- fiction – romance? )

Help the client join a book club at the local library.
Help client join a Lifelong Learning Osher group near you with intellectual activities they enjoy book groups, Current Events, Cosmology, Shakespeare – whatever they love to learn or learn again.For seniors who live at a higher level of care
1. If a senior is homebound sign them up for Senior Center Without Walls and let them make a choice of what classes they want to take
1. For a client who cannot get out anymore and is a birder, make birdseed ornaments and hang outside the window where the client can see. Take pictures of the birds that visit the hung ornaments. Get a bird field guide for the area and help identify birds who visit the ornaments to feed then if interested have the older person keep a journal of the birds they spot. If they are interested help them participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count

How Story Telling Can Give Elders with Dementia a Better Quality of Life

July 6, 2018

Want to increase and elder’s quality of life. Try storytelling.

As an aging professional, you can bring joy to an older person through reminiscence, story telling and oral history even elders with dementia

Just as storytelling helps children look forward to life- what is fun, what is scary, what never to do, it helps elders look back on their life. It gives both older and kids people a chance to socialize as they tell their story. The “telling ” also means someone usually listens or documents. That magically gives the elder and a child social interaction and connectedness. Elders vividly recall their past by telling from vignettes in their life – especially life in their 20’s, which sparks the richest recall called the “20’s bump”, according to researchers.

Elders sharing stories means passing on history, so it becomes intergenerational. The older person is given a chance to give the larger picture of their life and family history to children and grandchildren or extended family, who may not have heard all the details of their grandparents or parents life before. So a dual dose of quality of the older person of both the older person and the aging family is increased through oral history and reminiscence

An aging professional, like a geriatric care manager, can suggest family or friends just sitting down and prompting a story or oral history using technology like an i Phone or i Pad

Even elders with Alzheimer’s can find new joy with Reminiscence

When an elderly person develops Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, the short-term memory is frequently affected but long-term memories can remain as intact and as vivid as they have always been during the course of the patient’s life. As a result healthcare professionals can use a practice called reminiscence therapy to help combat the frustration, confusion, and depression that can often accompany dementia and even bring joy to the older person

What is reminiscence therapy?

Reminiscence therapy is like a therapy session where the elderly person will spend time recalling memories of his or her life, perhaps telling stories about things that happened and events the person can recall.

Care managers and senior professionals can use photos, familiar objects, or other such items to help jog the memory of the elder. Some therapists can a scrapbook of a person’s life, including photos, letters, and other such personal memorabilia. This becomes a visual biography of the patient’s life and helps him or her remember who he or she is.

How does this quality of life therapy help? Almost all elderly men and women can feel deeply discouraged and frustrated with their memory issues. Reminiscence can give peace and acceptance of the current situation by helping the person remember that he or she has had a good and full life. It also prompts the communication skills of elderly people who otherwise may not feel very compelled to open up and share anything with anyone else.

Using Reminiscence therapy techniques can give the confused elder a richer quality of life by giving them with time with other people who will actually listen to them. Through this, a dementia patient is made to feel their thoughts and feelings actually matter. To someone who has an elderly loved one suffering from dementia, this benefit alone can make reminiscence therapy a form of joy.

There is even an app called Grey Matters, which caregivers and care managers can look into for reminiscence therapy for elders with dementia. If the senior is a BBC fan, like me, the BBC even has an app called RemArc to help dementia sufferers with reminiscence using old clips from the BBC. You can see in the future an app that has clips from Star Wars for present baby boomers or generations after that.

Quality of Life Assessment Combats Isolation

July 4, 2018

We live in an age where we can communicate with family across the country and around the globe with a few clicks of a mouse or taps on a smartphone screen. However, despite advances in communications technology and the increasing connectedness it brings, research indicates that, as a society, we are lonelier than we have ever been. Perhaps no other age group feels the keen sting of loneliness more than the elderly.

One of the biggest issues for seniors is that their social circles begin to shrink as we get older. Friends, significant others, and family members move or pass away. Even those who still live close by may be inaccessible due to limited mobility, triggered many times once a senior can no longer drive safely. Age-related changes in one’s physical condition, such as hearing loss and low vision, can make it so difficult to communicate that it doesn’t seem worth the effort anymore

In the UK, only 17% of older people are in contact with family, friends, and neighbors less than once a week, and 11% in contact less than once a month.

Lifespan, a care management program in Santa Cruz, California, has just begun a quality of life program called “Well Being”. Their program is designed to bring joy back to elderly clients, many of whom are isolated or living alone. They serve elders at any stage of their lives- from mentally clear to levels of dementia. Lifespan employs personal assistants trained in quality of life activities ,to engage elders in intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual quality of life activities after the care manager does a quality of life assessment and creates a quality of life action plan outlining what activities would bring back joy and activities they love and can do again with the personal assistant help.

How Does Atul Gawande View Quality of Life in Dying ?

July 3, 2018

Atul Gawande ‘s acclaimed book, “Being Mortal“ opened our eyes to the medical way of death. He showed millions of readers how the quality of life and human interaction while dying trump the number of years gained through questionable painful procedures and dying in an institution.

He tells us that “our ultimate, goal, after, is not a good death but a good life to the very end’

GCM Nina Herndon brings you that same quality of life message- about dying –where an elder can still live the end life with joy. Her new chapter “Supporting Clients’ Quality of Life: Drawing on Community, Informal Networks, and Care Manager Creativity” in the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition is a geriatric care management Nina has devoted her career to giving elders a care plan for a happy life and a happy life to the very end.

She now has a new product Joyfull Moments out an individualized Activity Kit you can order and help an older client reclaim joy through Quality of Life activities designed by Nina’s Hummingbird Program.

Bringing joy in the here and now of dying can be done through using quality of life tools- Spiritual, emotional, intellectual, creative and physical quality of life. Increasing the spiritual quality of life can mean for a person is dying and wishes to return to a spiritual group she knew before, connecting them to the faith they are familiar with. Even homebound clients can have visits from members of a religious community or a prelate. They can have hymns sung, prayers said or whatever religious ritual their spiritual group follows, like communion, at home. Care providers can be trained to engage them by reading religious texts or playing hymns.

Spirituality can be the environment. I once had a client who was in a nursing home dying of cancer and wanted to go home to die with hospice and 24-hour care. His spirituality was the environment and he had been a lead volunteer to build a trail in Santa Clara California from Los Gatos up the steep winding highway 17 over the Santa Cruz mountains to the Lexington Reservoir. He had no family so the care manager asked the volunteers he had worked with, if they would visit him at his home. They happily agreed and 300 volunteers took shifts, 24 hours a day to sit with him reminisce, tell stories and sing while he died over several weeks. This is what joy that bringing a spiritual quality of life can offer in dying.

How Does Atul Gawande View Quality of Life in Dying ?

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