A key tool for a care manager, nurse advocate, a geriatric professional is a care plan. You can put a perfect care plan in place but if you do not understand what how it will never work, you do not understand care planning.
You have to know how your care plan might be blocked. To break down the barriers to get a care plan accepted, an aging professional must hear the older client’s unstated desired outcomes. What do they want that they may not be telling you? It might involve the ” Dutiful Daughter Syndrome”.
Mrs. Sterling in the YouTube below is telling the care manager, Miss Full Charge-she really wants her daughter Jane to come by every night and bring something to her- whatever it is food, a coupon, a picture, it still meant love. She does not accept care because she fears she would not see her daughter on a regular basis. Yet, Mrs. Sterling did not voice that outcome.
The aging professional who had a “Whole Family Approach”, understood the underlying outcome that was never voiced by the client. If she had not and Jane did not assure her she would always be there, the whole care plan would fall apart. Jane had to be the dutiful daughter, as Mrs. Sterling had been in Denmark.How to you arrange needed care and give the daughter and mother both what they want?
How do you understand these unstated needs of clients that will literally turn over your apple cart?
Watch this video to see how you the care manager or aging professional will do your care plan to meet the mother and daughter’s unstated needs.
Bunni Dybnis MA, LMFT, CMC Director of Professional Services LivHome, LA
and Steve Barlam Chief Professional Officer, Co-Founder LivHome
MSW, LCSW, CMC, both highly expert care managers, created a seminal chapter on the Tools that a care manager or geriatric social worker need to work with aging families in my book Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family. They cover these CORE skills in that chapter, including how to see a care plan may be blocked.
