Start-Up Geriatric Care Management Marketing and PR Checklist

April 7, 2021

To grow an ALCA or Geriatric Care management business, you must use- marketing and public relations (PR). ( usually social workers and nurses have never done )Here is a helpful start –

Start-Up Geriatric Care Management PR/ Marketing Checklist

1. Brand Identity- including logo design and collateral material design

Services needed to complete

Research competition, develop key differentiating features, develop a brand positioning statement, and develop business names, graphic design for the logo.

, colors for business communication. Consider consulting a branding firm.

2. Business Identity –

Get coordinated business card envelopes, note cards, and folders

Services needed to complete

Graphic design, printing, and delivery

3. Products sheets or Sell sheets, Brochures

Services needed to complete- Copywriting, graphic design, printing, and delivery

4. Identified and 3rd party targets – including a prospect profile

Services needed to complete-

Identify targets ( elder law attorneys, assisted living, concierge physicians, trust/wealth management departments) in your services area. Research develops prospect profiles, mailing lists, key factors in specific communication messages per target audience. Add to marketing excel sheets.

Want to know more?

How Can Someone with Dementia Have a Better Quality of Life on a Holiday ?

April 2, 2021

Reminiscence and Story Telling

This Easter holiday is the perfect occasion to engage elders with dementia. The role of storytelling and reminiscence is very important for elders, as they look back on their life and holidays bring strong long-term memories. It gives them a chance to socialize as they tell their story. It also means someone usually listens or documents. That magically gives the elder social interaction and connectedness. So many Easter rituals can prompt stories for elders with some level of dementia. The ritual of dying easter eggs, finding easter baskets on Easter morning, dressing up for the local Easter Parade, eating ritual foods at Easter dinner or at Easter Brunch. Whether the older person is actually participating or watching, these rituals can prompt stories from their long-term memory.

Elders sharing stories means passing on history.

This gives the older person a chance to give the larger picture of their life and family history to children and grandchildren or extended family, who may have not heard all the details of their grandparents or parents’ life before- what they cooked, what they did on holidays like Easter. So the quality of the older person of both the older person and the aging family is increased through oral history and reminiscence

The aging professional can suggest family or friends just sitting down and prompting a story or oral history using technology like your phone

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 vivid as they have always been during the course of the patient’s life. As a result, a family 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.

Sometimes senior experts or family members can use photos, familiar objects, or other such things to help jog the memory of the patient. Some therapists and family members 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 the older person remember who he or she is.

How does this quality of life therapy help? Almost all elderly men and women can start feeling 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 communication skills of elderly people who otherwise may not feel very compelled to open up and share anything with anyone else.

Dementia and Reminiscence of Easter

So this Easter holiday try reminiscence. People with dementia can receive a richer quality of life when people actually listen to them. They feel as their thoughts and feelings actually matter. For anyone who has an elderly loved one suffering from dementia, this benefit alone can make reminiscence therapy a form of joy for a very confused elder. So when you dye Easter eggs, create easter baskets, do an Easter egg hunt, serve an Easter brunch or dinner, get them involved, let them watch, allow them to help if possible, serve them ritual food or to taste it and ask when how they experienced these rituals, when they were young. If you have old albums of pictures from their childhood of them at Easter, look and the photos with them. Then listen.

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YouTube channel: Website: https://cathycress.com/

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Email: cressgcm@got.net

Caregiver Assessment- What Does It Takes Professionally ?

March 30, 2021

Doing TWO Assessments

To meet the needs of the whole aging family, the care receiver, and the caregivers, GCMs need to begin assessing the caregiver as well as the care receiver. There is a synergy between the caregiver and client – they are interdependent. If the caregiver is stressed or weak the client does not receive good care. They both suffer without supports that a care manager can give them.

A caregiver assessment helps the GCM see this faltering interdependence by using a caregiver assessment. The National Center on Caregiving at the Family Caregiver Alliance calls this a process gathering information describing the caregiving situation and identifying the family caregivers’ particular problems, needs, resources, and strengths. This means that the care manager can see issues from a caregiver’s perspective and can focus on what supports they need to give them the best care. The GCM compares this to the client’s assessment of needs. The result of doing two assessments is discovering both the client/ care receiver needs and restore health and well-being, prevent poor care, client injury or illness, caregiver burnout, trauma or quiting, and unnecessary placement in a nursing home.

Create a Circle of Care

One resource that a GCM can bring to a caregiving family is what Gail Sheehy calls a circle of care. To create this supportive connection, the GCM needs to take her or his coaching skills and put together a support system around the formerly isolated, solitary family caregiver. The GCM can coach the family caregiver to ask for help so the GCM can assist in reorganizing the family so adult siblings can share in the care of the older client with the identified family caregiver. The GCM is what Sheehy calls a compassionate coach who can help the beleaguered caregiver attract and assemble a platform to keep on giving the care she or he wants to give the aging person.

Caregiver Resources

A circle of care includes emotional resources for the direct family caregiver. These emotional resources could and should include adult siblings. Reconnecting midlife brothers and sisters, through the circle of care, is an important GCM task, as siblings are the longest and deepest relationships in any person’s life. The GCM may have to depend on his or her clinical skills in helping siblings with forgiveness or reconnecting siblings who live long distances apart to add them to a circle of care. Midlife siblings have often spent the last 30 years tending to their own families, so the point of reconnection of midlife brothers and sisters often happens when they are in middle age in the midst of a crisis in parent care. This is where the GCM needs to employ clinical skills in midlife sibling work or to find the resources for the family to help with this healing sibling reconnection.

What are 8 Spiritual Quality Of Life Activities for Elders for the Holiday Season?

March 26, 2021

Spirituality Helps Elder Quality of Life Skyrocket With on Holidays

Now that we are entering a season of high spiritual celebrations Passover and Easter- it is important to involve elders who wish to celebrate the holidays. Religious rituals celebrated with family, friends, members of a congregation ( even on zoom in COVID)offer socialization and reminiscence thus the quality of life so many elders and can return joy to their lives especially in the pandemic that was like maggots to the wound of senior isolation.

Religion Comes in a Filing Cabinet

Leonie Nowitz, a geriatric care manager who has a deep interest in spirituality and writes about it often, once told me to look at spirituality as a question ” What is this all about”. As we age this question becomes primal, as we face death coming at a rapid pace. We wonder- do I go to heaven, to hell, or just energy or dust. Will I meet angels- my wife in heaven.?

Ms. Nowitz said that when you define religion, look at it as a filing cabinet with each drawer is a religion with it’s an answer to spirituality ” “What Is this all About”. There is one for Jews, Protestants, Hindu’s Muslims, Quakers, The Environment- all religions and belief systems.

How to Find An Elder’s Holiday Joy

So find this ” What’s This All About”filing” cabinet and pull out the right spiritual drawer. One assessment care managers can do to locate the filing drawer, is a Quality of Life assessment . You can find a geriatric care management quality of life assessment in the chapter on Quality of Life in the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th ed, written by GCM Nina Herndon.

Using this GCM tool, you will find where joy can be found again for your client. If spirituality is something that would increase an elders’ quality of life, here are some activities that you may suggest to an older client or their family, especially on holidays when places of worship have their most spectacular music, smells, and bells, and pageantry.

Spiritual Quality of Life Activities During Coming Holidays

Make sure the older person can attend a seder or easter dinner with family or friends if the elder all participants are fully vaccinated. If not try to arrange a zoom attendance and have the ritual dinner home delivered
If an older person has dementia, you can offer to reminisce through questions about how they spent holidays like Passover or Easter when they were young.
If the elder is homebound, has dementia, or cannot go out reconnect him or her with his spiritual background through arranging a ritual Easter or Passover dinner made or delivered.
If a ritual holiday meal is not a good choice play familiar holiday prayer, music, etc.
If you have a lonely or isolated client with no local family who wishes to return to a religious group over the holidays, reconnect them by arranging their attendance at a seder or Easter brunch or dinner, with a small fully vaccinated group from a congregation 0f a local church or synagogue or through a zoom holiday meal event or service.
On Passover or Easter arrange for the elder to listen to holiday spiritual music, or readings from a sacred text from their own religion or watch a service on television or streaming via computer.
Decorate their room with holiday decorations that represents their own religious holiday.
If attending a holiday meal is not possible and a holiday event will take place like an Easter egg hunt have the older person attend if fully vaccinated or watch on zoom.

Reach Cathy in Social Media

Social media links

YouTube channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaoHdozwS0RvKD

Social media links

YouTube channel: Website: https://cathycress.com/

Blog: https://www.cathycress.com/blog/

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Gerontologist/Cathy-Cress-MSW-633836950007072/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cathyjocress

Email: cressgcm@got.net

Can You Give a Good Death without” Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light”?

March 9, 2021

Dylan’s Thomas warns us in his poem

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Give a good death – not a cold terrifying dying of the light.

But today a care manager or geriatric social worker can help an older client go gentle into that good night, they do not have to burn and rage at the close of their day because you will be giving them as Atul Gawande suggests – a good death – not a cold terrifying dying of the light.

The terminal phase of any life-threatening illness is the time between diagnosis and the final decline when no cure or extension of life is in the offing. The individual confronts progressive decline and deterioration. Death is imminent. The care manager has a role.

The focus of doctors and patients now changes from attempting to cure the illness or prolong life to trying to provide relief from pain and to comfort the sufferer. Religious concerns such as what happens after someone passes away or how to handle the suffering at the end of life or how to give comfort to family members are the focus during this time as well as trying to tie up any loose ends.

Death to Rage About- Alone in the Hospital

But in the time of the plague, when 95.5 % of souls still die in the hospital and not at

home the care manager has a critical role with the family. High tech introduced by the care manager and at times the hospital with the care manager coordinating the family outsides and unable to touch their dying loved one – can make this death full of rage more gentle as the person passes into the night.

Care Manager tasks:

Make a referral to hospice if the family has not already reached out

Partner with hospice and work under them

Monitor anticipatory grief needs

Communicate that this is the end (and time to say goodbye)

Assess spiritual needs and contact the appropriate religious-spiritual counselors to provide comfort and healing.

Encourage family members to say The Four Things That Matter Most “Please forgive me”, “I forgive you”, “Thank you”, and “I love you”.

Assess the need for paid caregivers to help the family or help family members share round the clock care among family and friends

Support the family members in their need to grieve and have respite by continuing to assess for overload and burn out with a caregiver assessment tool

Prepare family for the active phase of dying which can be loud and disturbing to someone who is not aware of what will occur

Bring in technology if death is alone in the hospital

Join me Thursday, March 11, and learn why End of Life Services Are a perfect new service for care managers

Deliver a Good End of Life- Add Death and Dying to Your Care Management Agency

Serve Your Client Until Death Do You Part

In this 1 ½ -hour webinar you will learn how to

1.Transition the patient/family through the five stages of death

2. Help clients be active participants in their care

3.Give the family/caregiver tools to manage care

4 Provide family center care to caregiver and family

5 Choose the right support services through all stages of death

6.Introduce Hospice and Palliative care and work with their team

7 Use ALCA End of Life Benefits During COVID

8.Use COVID -19 Family Coaching for GCM

SIGN UP

If you really want to add End of Life to your care management business sign up for this webinar now

Gwendolyn LAZO Harris MA, CT, Seniors at Home, San Francisco and Diane LeVan MA both highly expert care managers, created a seminal chapter “Palliative Care and End of Life Care Manager ” in my book Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family

How Can Someone with Dementia Have a Better Quality of Life on a Holiday ?

Reminiscence and Story Telling

Elders sharing stories means passing on history.

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

What is reminiscence therapy?

Dementia and Reminiscence of Easter

Reach Cathy in Social Media

Social media links

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Connect with Cathy

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”