caregiver burnout Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

10 marketing messages for Adult Kids Who Call 911 GCM After Holidays

December 29, 2019

“Geriatric care managers are wonder woman for long-distance care providers? “

This is an important marketing message for care managers to use for the call you will get from long-distance family members who just spent the holidays with aging parents and freaked out at the decline.

So be prepared with terrific marketing copy and messaging when they call you.

Your copy in an ad or website should include-

“It’s a preventative and prudent idea to have a geriatric care manager in the town where your older relative resides. If there is a crisis, it is cheaper to have a GCM solve it. In an urgent situation, a care manager can go to the hospital or emergency room. This is saner and more cost-effective than you getting on last-minute, expensive flights. You can still go but they can immediately be there to deal with the crisis. They are good insurance.

Even when making marketing visits to 3rd parties like elder law attornies or wealth managers, you can pitch “Before any crisis, the GCM do an initial assessment and visit your long-distance older relative periodically (once a month, once every two months).This is preventative. That way they are there for you when you need them and have all the information to solve the problem.”

Here is a better marketing message for long-distance adult children:

“Think of care managers the way you do one of those “blow-up beds.” You can pump them up when you need them in a crisis—actually avoid that crisis, and you yourself can sleep more soundly and with more peace of mind in your own bed.

Some of the things a geriatric care manager can do for long-distance care providers are:

1. Save you money by helping keep your parent out of the hospital and you off emergency long-distance flights.

2.Facilitate a family discussion of needs, resources, and division of labor among friends family

3. Recommend ways to proactively prepare and plan for a parent’s possible health care crisis.

4. Work on family cooperation to formulate a realistic parent-care plan.

5.Assess the strengths and weaknesses of all of the potential caregivers

6. Help adult siblings resolve conflicts about care decisions.

7. Help siblings act together in the best interest of the parent

8.Decrease the tension between hometown and long distance siblings

9. Help the long-distance care provider deal with guilt and frustration that may result from their inability to provide more of the day-to-day care.

10. Locate aging resources in your elder parents’ area quickly and without you having to do it.

Learn more about gaining new long-distance care provider clients -this coming holiday season.

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What are the 3 Steps to Do a Caregiver Assessment?

October 12, 2019

Where Do You Do A Caregiver Assessment?

Caregiver assessment is best done in the care receiver’s home so you can actually observe the care. It is best completed out of earshot of the older person who is cared for so the caregiver can feel free to talk openly. As caregivers suffer high levels of stress, giving them a separate space to share their feelings is an important part of the caregiver assessment. However, the caregiver assessment should be done in a place that is convenient to the caregiver, which could be a donut shop, the home, or any comfortable venue. If to do the caregiver assessment the GCM must arrange respite, like bringing in another family member or paid caregiver, then that is another way to make this assessment go forward.

How Will A Genogram Help A Caregiver Assessment?

A genogram also helps the GCM assess whether any extended family and friends will make suitable and emotionally appropriate caregivers or not. For example, if a son has a historically strained relationship with his father, is he a good choice as a caregiver? The genogram helps to assess this old family tension and helps the GCM decide with the family as to who can really be good caregivers.

How Does a Psychosocial Assessment Bolster a Caregiver Assessment?

In addition, a psychosocial assessment, done at intake or updated as more care is needed, assesses key abilities and availability of the extended network of family caregivers. The psychosocial assessment illuminates the client’s financial status, including income, assets, benefits currently being received, health and long-term care insurance coverage, and eligibility or potential eligibility for entitlement programs. This information helps the GCM assess whether outside paid care providers can be afforded if needed to replace a family caregiver. The psychosocial assessment also tells about the family, formal and informal support networks, present and potential caregivers, and cultural variables.

Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

Caregiver Assessment- Can it Prevent Caregiver Burnout?

October 3, 2019

Caregiver Burnout is Big Federal Problem

Family caregivers are so many times in a complete state of caregiver burnout. From a policy perspective, the federal government and the long-term care system in the United State cannot afford to neglect the burnout and strain of millions of Americans caregivers any longer.

Despite the rewards caregivers get from giving care we know from years of research that being a family caregiver results in brutal losses. These degradations and deficits include role conflict and overload from the never-ending tasks demanded of a caregiver. Left in a permanent state of worry and anxiety much of the time, caregivers are working in a deteriorating and unpredictable situation.

Caregivers Feel Trapped

Caregivers can feel entrapped by there the restrictions on their own life. They are often beset by fiscal worries because they are not paid except in some states, like California under Medicaid. Yet the caregiving situation explodes in cost through medical bills, medical equipment and informal care that must be brought in, if the family can afford it.

Caregivers Are Not Attorneys

Family caregivers face a quagmire of legal problems including untangling wills, trusts, and inheritance issues which generally complicate care both emotionally and physically. Many times these family caregivers compound their fiscal woes by having to quit their job, running the risk of never being hired again, and that is if they can eventually return to work.

Caregivers Mental Health Ravaged

The caregivers own physical and mental health is often ravaged. They have to do medical tasks that years ago family caregivers never had to do. If they were paid by an agency, this would be a workman’s compensation nightmare for the company, yet these family caregivers are never even paid. So it is time that geriatric care managers and other professionals in aging started to respond to this family caregiver nightmare and use a caregiver assessment every time they assess an older client tended by a family caregiver.

Find out more in the YouTube below from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

Innappropriate Threat of Placement =Caregiver Assessment

September 30, 2019

When a Caregiver is so Overwhelmed that A SNF is a Choice but a Very Bad Choice

If the family is so overwhelmed by the care that they are considering placement, this threat should trigger the GCM to do a caregiver assessment immediately, found in the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management If the GCM is called to relocate an older person and the underlying cause seems to be caregiver burnout, this can be another trigger for a caregiver assessment. If caregiver abuse is suspected, a caregiver assessment is a critical immediate tool. This is a situation where the GCM must contact Adult Protective Services, following their own state’s laws. Elder abuse can be triggered by caregiver stress in some situations. Depression that reaches a clinical level in a caregiver can be predictive of elder abuse of an elderly client can prompt a GCM to do a caregiver assessment. You should also do a geriatric depression scale at the same time. Use the GDS and the caregiver assessment to help both the caregiver and the care receiver at the same time.

Mrs. Handy has Two Dads in Her Head

Mrs. Handy our caregiver in many other blogs is about to place her Dad because she is besieged by so many other stressors. Her own health is deteriorating because she cannot get any sleep, due to her Dad going to bed so late and her inability to rise above her old self when her Dad was 40 and she was 19 and what he said she did. Now he is 70, very impaired with vascular dementia, incontinent and she needs to be who she is in the here and now a woman of 40, caring for an impaired Dad in her 70’s. She needs to set the boundary of him going to be early. She needs help in getting rid of the old parent in her head and putting the 70-year-old demented incontinent parent before her. This is what a geriatric care manager can do for her to help avoid unnecessary placement.

Caregiver Assessment- When The Caregiver Loses Sense of Self

September 22, 2019

One Homeostatic System

When you assess an older client with a family caregiver, you really have two clients. The needs of the family caregiver are different than the needs of the care receiver and the geriatric care manager or aging professional must differentiate those needs to make sure the care receiver’s functional and psychosocial needs are met. The care receiver and the family caregiver are one homeostatic system encompassing the whole aging family. To keep that family healthy and whole, in the middle of swirling care crisis, the care manager must first recognize that there are multiple clients including the person who gives or supervises care. In a health care insult, family members who give care are often referred to by the inanimate wooden term “ resources”. They have also been referred to as “ informants “.

Stripping Caregivers Personhood

This stripping of personhood denudes them of their status as individuals and melts them into the caregivers, thus breeds professional ignorance, like the crowd who watched the emperor with no clothes. We are blind to caregiver’s humanity and thus their own needs.

Seld-Esteem Vanishes With Caregiving

Many family caregivers lose their self-esteem because they fail at so many other parts of their lives when their whole life seems to be taken up by caregiving. They do not get vacations as the care-receiver does not take a break from illness and aging. Often there are few others to give them respite. Caregivers, often they just do not know where to find help or even ask for it. If family caregivers have children and husbands, they are often squeezed between their needs, the needs of the care receiver – thus have no room for their own needs. They are breathless and slogging forward.

Innappropriate Threat of Placement =Caregiver Assessment

When a Caregiver is so Overwhelmed that A SNF is a Choice but a Very Bad Choice

Mrs. Handy has Two Dads in Her Head

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