Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

Where Do You Find A Caregiver Assessment ?

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I have received comments asking where to find a caregiver assessment. I have crafted an assessment tool for geriatric care managers. The assessment is included the chapter on caregiver assessment in my book Care Manager’s Working With The Aging Family and is crafted into an entire service or product in My Geriatric Care Management Operations Manual

 

In general, research into caregiver assessment tells us that they should be tailored to the care giving context, service setting and the program. There is no single protocol for all caregiver assessments. The National Center on Care Giving at Family Caregiver Alliance has suggested that no one approach is optimal in all care settings and situations. I have devised a geriatric care manager caregiver assessment tool that you can be free to alter as you see fit.

 

A geriatric care manager or aging professional can also use the Stress and Appraisal Coping Framework, suggested by Barbara and Carmen Morano in their excellent article on caregiver assessment in the GCM Journal , Winter/ Spring 2007, as another excellent caregiver assessment tool for family caregivers.

 

All are good choices for care manager’s to begin assessing beleaguered and long neglected family caregivers.

 

We are all gathered at the edge of this new world of assessing caregivers and can use thee resources as a starting place.

 

 

Family Caregivers Suffer PTSD after Death of Care Receiver

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Paula Span who has written the New Old Age Blog in the New York Times for many years has great resources for older family members; geriatric care managers and aging professionals about seniors and family caregivers. Here is a that explains in painful detail that even when the care receiver dies the family caregiver suffers.  Some have PTSD, as mentioned in Span’s article referring to an expert in this at Stanford. I cared for my Dad for 20 years. He had PTSD from being in a German prisoner of war camp. I still have PTSD from the memory of him dying in the emergency room. It can happen to all family caregivers.

Caregiver Assessment- You Have Two Clients

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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 http://www.caremanager.org/  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 “.

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.

 

Caregiver Assessment- Can it Prevent Caregiver Burnout?

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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 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 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 care-giving situation explodes in cost through medical bills, medical equipment and informal care that must be brought in, if the family can afford it.

 

Family caregivers face a quagmire of legal problems including untangling wills, trusts, and inheritance issues which generally complicate care both emotional and physically. Many times these family caregivers compound their fiscal woes by having to quit their job, running the risk of being hired again, if they can eventually return to work. 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 caregiver’s 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.

 

Listen to E Care Diary- Helping Seniors with ADL’s and IADL’s

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E Care Diary will feature an interview with me on January 22 on helping seniors with activities of daily living . I will be expanding of what I have covered in my blog for the past few weeks, a geriatric assessment and how it helps older people function better in their environment. Tune in and ask questions on line.

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