What Does a Care Manager Do Before End of Life Diagnosis?

November 29, 2022

End of Life has 5 Phases

Before the end-of-life diagnosis, the ALCA or GCM care manager helps clients be active participants in their care and gives the family caregiver the tools to manage the care.

The geriatric care manager serves older adults before they find they are dying. GCMs work with chronic care clients, sometimes for years, who eventually succumb to their illness. But they also work with clients who come to them facing the end of life issues.

The process of acceptance and adjustment to terminal illness has five phases:

before the diagnosis,

the acute phase

the chronic phase

the recovery phase

the terminal phase
Geriatric Care Managers’ Tasks Before the diagnosis
Schedule medical appts
Help family ask questions of medical professionals
Before visiting the client maintain an updated medication list and a list of any drug allergies
Assist the family in organizing all Advanced care planning documents documents
Go to medical appointments with the client or train family members make a list of questions and have ready
Set up personal health records.
Assist family members in setting up and use of a calendar to keep a log of important medication information, questions, and things out of the ordinary that happens to the ill person
Join me Tuesday, January 24, 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 caregivers 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
Free Webinar

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

How Storytelling at Thanksgiving Can Give Elders A Happier Family Holiday

November 22, 2022

Want to increase aging parents’ and everyone’s enjoyment at Thanksgiving? Try storytelling at Thanksgiving using elders’ memories.

As an aging professional, you can bring joy to an older person through reminiscence, storytelling, and oral history for elders

This Thanksgiving, if you really do travel to a family home or grandma’s house, travel safely If not make the safest choice, stay home and use Zoom and include your elderly

parent. You can do oral history for elders if they can use a computer or have a family member or friend who visits often and who lives nearby and is in their bubble serve and share Thanksgiving dinner at their home and use zoom with them to see other family members on the holiday.

Share Your Thanksgiving Story

If you are at a family member’s holiday dinner and use reminiscence for elders by asking everyone to tell their favorite story about a Thanksgiving dinner. Start with midlife members to get the idea and then ask

again parents to share their stories.

Oral history for elders will bring extra thanks to Thanksgiving by learning about an elder’s past and giving them the opportunity to share, which sometimes they do not do in the hubbub of family talking.

The “telling ” also means someone documents. That magically gives the elder and a child social interaction and connectedness. Elders vividly recall their past by telling stories 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 try storytelling at Thanksgiving and 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 grandparent’s or parent’s life before. My 10 grandchildren have grown up with their now 80-year-old grandfather. telling them exciting stories of when he was a California Highway patrolman. So a dual dose of a higher quality of life for both the older person and the aging family is increased through oral history and reminiscence.

Capture Your Families Past Before It Is Gone

Many midlife adults now do ancestry and regret that they did not ask questions of older family members when they were alive. Capture that past now on this family holiday. An aging professional or a geriatric care manager can suggest family or friends record the Thanksgiving story as oral history using technology like an i Phone or i Pad.

Story Telling at Thanksgiving with Story Worth

Another great idea to capture reminiscence for elders is giving them StoryWorth.

My daughter sent this gift to her Dad and both he and I love it. Each week StoryWorth sends a question to my husband that prompts him to write about his past. He writes his reminiscence out longhand and I easily use the dictation on my phone and email his story to Story Worth.

At the end of the year, my daughter will order a bound book of all the stories- a whole collection of memories, an oral history of an elder father that she might never think to ask and will be saved for her and her children to pass on family history. I will order a copy for all her three siblings. Equally important, my husband, really enjoyed writing about his past and the prompts have brought many vivid memories back to him.

Sweet grandmother holding a beautifully cooked turkey dinner.

Adult Sibling Rivalry at Thanksgiving- Where To Get Help?

October 25, 2022

Siblings are The Biggest Source Of Stress Between Human Beings

At family rituals, like Thanksgiving next month, adult siblings often are often brought back together. If you are one- will it be a happy feast or wrecked by holiday sibling rivalry??

Sibling Rivalry Can Give Acid Reflux to Grandma’s Thanksgiving Dinner

As Gail Sheehy said in her book, Passages in Caregiving, we think that siblings will automatically support each other when aging parents fall apart. Sheehy quotes sociologists, Karl Pillemer and J. Jill Suitor, on sibling rivalry, in a study they did conclude that siblings are inherent rivals and the biggest source of stress between human beings.

If you are a midlife sibling, perhaps you have a brother or sister to whom you hardly speak because of sibling rivalry. Maybe you are about to see your siblings at the coming Thanksgiving feast, even on zoom during COVID, and anticipate largely ignoring him or her or doing chitchat as you seethe the inside. If you fit this description of sibling rivalry, you are in the same lurching boat as uncounted baby boomer siblings all over the world.

Childhood Wound Ripped Open

That wound from childhood may still ache enough to keep you on the furrowed path your family followed when you were young. Now, however, you and your adult siblings, nearing or at retirement age, may need to come together again to be part of a niece or

adult siblings need to come together for aging parents

nephew’s wedding or christening, help plan a parent’s anniversary dinner, or, most important, oversee the increasing care of elderly family members.

Best Thanksgiving Sibling Rivalry Film

I suggest you watch Pieces of April, a fabulous Thanksgiving film ( lead 21-year-old Katy Holmes debuts in a standout performance) where the film’s dysfunctional family revolves around adult sibling rivalry. The film is also about interracial couples, and in the end, around a catastrophic illness of the aging parent, where the siblings need to resolve their differences. It also makes it a trifecta with dementia. The grandmother, who has dementia is taken out of her nursing home to join the dysfunctional Thanksgiving feast and offers surprising sanity to the sibling-rivalry drama.

If you recognize this problem in your own family, seek counseling before coming the holidays engulf you. Contact the Aging Life Care Association to find help before a parental crisis.

SIGN UP FOR MY HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

holiday sibling rivalry

Get Ready for the Holiday Rush

WEDNESDAY, November 16th, 2022, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Learn how to create!

Pre-Holiday Social media campaigns to reach worried caregivers
Pre- Holiday-Materials about the warning signs that a parent needs help
Pre-Holiday Marketing to help you sign up families who might face a serious decline in aging parents

How to sell services to desperate post-holiday callers from Normal dysfunctional & long-distance family
How to use tools to contain holiday chaos & arrange care in festive family fright
How to move the family to New Year’s stability

Position Your Agency ahead of Care Managers who do not have great pre-holiday marketing campaigns and lack the clinical skills how to work with Adult Children and families during the chaotic aging family holiday visit when adult kids find their aging parents need care
Featuring

Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care

Management

Featuring Speaker

Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care

Management

THIS FREE WEBINAR IS Tuesday, November 16th, 2021, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Sign Up Now

Find out more about dysfunctional families and sibling rivalry from My YouTube, Channel

Does VIP Marketing and Sales Plan Transform Your Bottom Line?

September 13, 2022

Marketing and Sales Plan to find VIP Clients Concierge Clients Will Make You a Profit

You need a VIP Marketing and Sales Plan to find Concierge Clients. Why- you can transform your agency into a profitable service by finding concierge clients for your care management agency

Why- a geriatric care manager is a powerful health care concierge, just like the new concierge medical services. This is a stellar selling point to potential GCM clients who are in the top 10% income brackets.

Find Concierge Clients upper 10% As Medicare Does Not Cover Long-Term Care

These well-to-do VIP Concierge clients can afford to pay privately for long-term care geriatric care management and private duty home care because they are financially in the upper 10% of the economy. Long-term care is not covered by Medicare, so only these wealthy Americans can pay for it.

Why is offering concierge services a great idea for this group of seniors? A geriatric care manager is a highly skilled professional who acts as a personal assistant to the aging family delivering the long-term care services they need at the right time, the right place for the right level of care

What Great Benefits You Bring When you Find the Concierge Client

What are the Benefits care managers offer VIP clients.You offer highly personalized aging parent care. VIP Concierge clients can reach you at almost any time. You build a deep relationship with the client and family. As a GPS through elder care, the GCM helps them step by step through one of the hardest journeys of their life. A geriatric care manager’s highly personalized service meets all the needs of the aging family and the client. GCMs are like a concierge at a 5-star hotel. They serve the family by solving their caregiving problems and making elder care more seamless. But here is a deal-breaker, most care managers did not know they must have. You need a marketing and sales background to do an intake and get the client into your services.

Join me in my newest FREE Webinar

Free Webinar on Finding Concierge Clients

Sign Up for My Latest Free Webinar

Care Managers Marketing to Wealth Managers”

When September 27^th, 2-3:30 PM Pacific

Sign-up Understand how to market to the target and you open the door to the top 5% of VIP Concierge Clients.

Learn how to sell your services to the gatekeepers to the clients who can pay privately for long periods of time, when you deliver your gold standard care management services.

Wealth managers and trust officers will refer their VIP clients to you if you can sell care management benefits and features to their entitled clients,

bring the right handouts and, do the perfect presentation with the winning pitch

When September 27^th, 2-3:30 PM Pacific

What you will learn

Why market to wealth managers and trust departments
The benefits and features GCM offers to wealth managers
Who are top wealth managers
How do you find them, setting up a meeting, what to bring, what to present with perfect pitch

Interview with GCM Patrice Harrison who works with trusts – what they want in a GCM

Sign-Up for this free webinar

Learn about a VIP Marketing and Sales Plan

FREE WHITE PAPER LEARN COPY & KEYWORDS TO ATTRACT VIP CLIENTS

Write Your powerful VIP Marketing and Sales Plan

Sign-up for my Free White paper to learn to use the copy & keywords to sign-up for home care or care management Concierge-VIP Clients who can afford care management & home care as Medicare does not cover long-term care

Starting an Aging Life Business- Should you Choose a Partnership ?

September 1, 2022

Should You Choose a Partnership to Start a Care Management Business?

Should you choose a partnership if you are starting an Aging Life or Geriatric Care Management business? Before you think of marketing your start-up, you need a legal entity. Business start-ups are not only tough but take a long, very specific to-do list. There are legal ways to start a business. Should you choose a partnership in the first place depends on market sizing and a competition survey. If it is a go you have to have a legal entity to operate in. One entity. Partnerships are like a marriage without sex. Should you go forward? What legal bucket fits your needs? What legal form fits your needs and is the least dangerous?

Partnerships- Good Bad or Ugly?

Should you choose a partnership? Forming a partnership can be good, bad, or ugly, like Janus the Greek God of doors, depending on the parties and circumstances involved. So open the right door

Right Door to Partnership

Should you choose a partnership ?Partnerships are the simplest and least expensive of co-owned business arrangements. Additionally, businesses with multiple owners are more likely to survive longer than sole proprietorships, says Economist Brian Headd of the U.S. Small Business Administration

Partners share the cost of a start-up.
They share responsibilities and work.
They share business risks and expenses.
The complementary skills and additional contacts of each partner can lead to the achievement of greater financial results together.
Partners can offer mutual support and motivation.

Wrong door to Partnership

Partners in a general partnership are jointly and individually liable for the business activities of the other. If your partner skips town, you’ll be liable for all the debts, not just half of them.
They share any profits.
You do not have total control over the business. Decisions are shared, and differences of opinion can lead to disagreements, one partner buying out the other one, or even a dissolution of the union.
The wrong partner can negatively affect your reputation.
A friendship may not survive a partnership. Keep in mind John D. Rockefeller’s famous words: “A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.”
When things go wrong as in any new business if you blame each other you have no deep feelings for the person, like a marriage engenders and expresses in sex to help you make up

Should you choose a partnership?Before entering into a partnership, it would be best to first determine whether or not you are suitable for this type of arrangement and if so, to thoroughly investigate possible business partners.

This is an SBA example of a partnership agreement

Find out more by subscribing to my YouTube channel from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

Contact

Connect with Cathy

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