Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

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Best Tool to Give the Family Holiday Hope

November 14, 2022

images_20141216-184443_1.jpg

 

Hope is the Best Tool on the Holidays !

How do you give the family Holiday Hope? During Christmas and Hannaka family caregivers, especially in the dysfunctional family can be drinking or numbing themselves from the pain of caregiving. They will ruin the holiday celebration in one way or

another. Maybe they are drugging themselves with the telly or abusing prescription drugs. Depression and anxiety ( rife among caregivers) are predictors of increased alcohol use.  

Upset

Social isolation, which is experienced by some caregivers, is also predictive of increased alcohol use.

Low angle

How do you Give the Family Holiday Hope? How do you as a geriatric care manager change the script for these aging dysfunctional families – family caregivers and older members who are supposed to care for but can’t? How does a professional GCM make the characters transform? 

 

It’s actually simple –but loaded with skill- give them hope. You need to use yourself to give them hope that things will change. It’s the best tool in a geriatric care manager toolbox- especially on and after the dreaded holidays.

 Use of Self

To give the family holiday hope the use of Self is perhaps the most powerful tool for geriatric care managers. The use of Self provides families with guarded optimism. GCMs have to offer a vision of the future that is based not only on a desire for hopeful outcomes. This has come from our own clinical knowledge and belief that change to their nasty crippled, family

system is indeed possible.

By being direct, empathetic, and

nonjudgmental, we become a holding bay for

stressed caregivers, creating a place of safety, 

confidentiality, consistency, and support.

Finally, give the family holiday hope by GCM’s offer our clients a model of

perseverance. By giving up on the possibility of

positive change and by exploring all options,

the GCM enables families to feel that, regardless of the outcome, they have done all that they can to support the older adult.

Be like Judy Garland  on the holiday offering hope


Have yourself a merry little Christmas.                         
Let your heart be light

        From now on
our troubles will be out of sight

Give the” Merry Christmas – next year

Give the Family Holiday Hope

SIGN UP FOR MY HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

Give the Family Holiday Hope

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
  • Give the Family Holiday Hope
  • 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        

 

SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL GERIATRIC CARE 1

Filed Under: Aging Alcohol Abuse, caregiver, Caregiver Burn Out, caregiver burnout, caregiver mental health, CAREGIVER RESOUCES, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, elder care manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, Loneliness, Long distance caregiver, Therapist Specializing in Aging Tagged With: aging life and geraitric care manager, aging life care manager, aging parent crisis, alcohol on the holidays, Alcolhol abuse in the elderly, care manager, case manager, dysfunctional family, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Holidays Crisis in aging family, holidays with aging parents, My Dysfunctional Family, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Use of Self

Best Tool for Dysfunctional Family on Holidays- Hope

December 7, 2021

 

Give Families Hope the Best Tool Post the Holidays

Give the family Hope, after Christmas and Hannaka their older loved ones, especially in the dysfunctional family, could be drinking or numbing themselves from the pain of aging. Adult children can also ruin the holiday celebration one way or another. Maybe they are drugging themselves with the telly or abusing prescription drugs. Depression and anxiety ( rife among caregivers) are predictors of increased alcohol use. Social isolation, which is experienced by some caregivers, is also predictive of increased alcohol use.

 

How do you as a geriatric care manager change the script for these aging dysfunctional families – family caregivers and older members who are supposed to care for but can’t. How does a professional GCM make the whole family transform to change? 

 

It’s actually simple –but loaded with skill- give the family hope. You need to and use yourself to give them hope that things will change. It’s the best tool in a geriatric care manager toolbox- especially on and after the dreaded holidays.

 Use Use of Self as a Power Care Manager Tool

Care managers  learning the use of Self is perhaps the most powerful tool for geriatric care managers. The use of Self provides families with guarded optimism. GCM’s have to offer a vision of the future that is based not only on a desire for hopeful outcomes. This has come from our own clinical knowledge and belief that change to their nasty crippled, family system is indeed possible. By being direct, empathetic, and nonjudgmental, we become a holding bay for stressed caregivers, creating a place of safety, confidentiality, consistency, and support.

Finally, GCM’s offer our clients a model of perseverance. By giving the possibility of positive change and by exploring all options, the GCM enables families to feel that, regardless of the outcome, they have done all that they can to support the older adult.

Be like Judy Garland  on the holiday offering hope


Have yourself a merry little Christmas.                         
Let your heart be light

        From now on
our troubles will be out of sight

Give the” Merry Christmas – next year

 

 

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar  

11 Vital Clinical Tools For Desperate Families Post-Holidays

             Thursday, Jan 6, 2022, 02:00 PM Pacific Time (the US and Canada)

 

  Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday  

 Join me Post-holiday and learn how to come to clinically rescue concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stockings through the use of self.     

 

 

 

 

Learn how to

Road sign message – Change just ahead
  • Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders
  • Master 11Vital Clinical Tools you to solve client problems
  • Implement Use of Self
  • Take Six Clinical Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families
  • Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist

 SIGN UP NOW

 

SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL GERIATRIC CARE 1

Filed Under: Aging Alcohol Abuse, caregiver, Caregiver Burn Out, caregiver burnout, caregiver mental health, CAREGIVER RESOUCES, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, elder care manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, Loneliness, Long distance caregiver, Therapist Specializing in Aging Tagged With: aging life and geraitric care manager, aging life care manager, aging parent crisis, alcohol on the holidays, Alcolhol abuse in the elderly, care manager, case manager, dysfunctional family, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Holidays Crisis in aging family, holidays with aging parents, My Dysfunctional Family, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Use of Self

Can a Caregiver Assessment Avoid UnnecessaryPlacement ?

April 9, 2021

GunnDadJacket.jpg

 

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 to use this valuable GCM tool. By using a caregiver assessment the geriatric care manager may find that building respite for the caregiver, through other relative or paid caregivers, a caregiver support group, or coaching the caregiver to make changes that make her/ his tasks more bearable and doable and avoid inappropriate placement of the older person

Avoid Elder Physical Abuse Though 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 and avoid the risk of physical abuse and prevent involvement of APS making the caregiver and care receiver’s lives even more painful and chaotic and risking placement in a nursing home.

Mrs. Handy has Two Dads in Her Head

Let’s take the example of Mrs. Handy, a caregiver daughter caregiver She calls a GCM as she is about to place her Dad. 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. The care manager coached her to set a new boundary for him to go to bed 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. In addition, she sees her doctor for depression, joins an online caregiver support group, and asks siblings in other towns to take her Dad once a month for a week. Her Dad is not moved to skilled nursing. This is what a geriatric care manager can do for her to help avoid unnecessary placement.

Find out more on my playlist “Caregiver Assessment” on My Youtube channel Geriatric Care 

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Filed Under: Aging, aging family crisis, aging life business, Aging Life Care, Aging Life Care Assocaition, aging life care manager, Alzheimers, care manager, caregiver, Caregiver Burn Out, caregiver burnout, caregiver coaching, caregiver mental health, CAREGIVER RESOUCES, coaching caregivers Tagged With: aging family, aging life care manager, aging life geriatric care, aging parent care, aging parent crisis, barrier to caregiver assessment, care manager, caregiver assessment, caregiver burden, caregiver burn out, caregiver burnout, caregiver coaching, caregiver overwhelm, case manager, elderabuse, geraitric assessment, geriatric care manager, innappropriate placement, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, secondary stressors, unnecessary placement

10 Alarm Bells to Give ” Just Shopping” Long Distance Callers Before Holiday

December 24, 2020

 

You will be Showered With Calls Over the Holidays

Long-distance family members from nearly normal or dysfunctional families will call you frantically from now on. 

Why?

It’s almost  Christmas, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving just passed but they could not see their older parents because of the COVID Risk.

They are having to manage their over 65 Mom and Dad’s Shelter in place from afar plus oversee their own families risk plus their own COVID laden holiday. These long-distance family caregivers were already reaching

burnout from constant pre-COVID travel and caring on top of their own work-life demands.

They are reaching implosion so they are going to call you.

Test to Give the Burnt Out Caregiver Calls FOR Information Before the Holidays

If they call for information before the holiday and are not ready to move forward, you can proactively offer them questions from this list of alarm bells that they can answer now or they can monitor during now and New Year holiday that could trigger engaging your services after they compare notes on a post-holiday call with you.

Below is a list of red flags. If they see any red signals on Thanksgiving, Hanukkah,

remotely or in-person if they take the very dangerous risk of travel on Christmas-encourage them that is the time to do something about it by hiring you as a care manager. You can question them with this  a checklist of worrisome  signs that signal the need for a local geriatric care manager,

 

Alarm Bells List – Dealing with Long Distance Aging Relatives  Before or During the Holidays

  • Unpaid bills if long-distance family members monitor bill pay from afar
  • Missed appointments with their physicians that  long-distance care provider monitor with their doctors
  • Clutter reported by neighbors, friends local senior agencies a home that was once always neat
  • Weight loss reported by the aging parents Dr’s or local visitors
  • Memory loss, change in short-term memory when they zoom, call facetime, etc.
  • Poor grooming for a person who was once meticulously, observed by local visitors friends senior agencies food delivery who visit.
  • Reports of getting lost
  • Reports of wandering
  • Refusing to go to holiday  religious services with friends or church transportation  to holiday religious services
  • refusing any suggestion or conversely agreeing to everything with-out consideration
  • Mood swings, getting angry when normally easy going
  • Refusing to go to medical providers
  • Not taking care of activities of daily living: cooking, bathing, dressing, housekeeping, etc.
  • Entering contests, credit card maxed out on shopping channels
  •  Set up a meeting when the holidays end. You have helped them proactively, begin to engage your services.

    Sign Up for My Free January Webinar  

    5 Vital Clinical Tools to Help Aging Dysfunctional Families-Post Horrid Holidays- 

                 Thursday, January 21, 2021

      Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday  

     Join me and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stocking.      

    Learn how to!

    • Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders
    • Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family
    • Master Vital Clinical Tools, you to solve client problems
    • Take Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families
    • Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist

     SIGN UP NOW

     

     

    Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel  Geriatric Care

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Alarm Bells For Long Distance Family, Blog, caregiver burnout, caregiver mental health, Close The Sale, Closing a GCM Sale, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, HolidaySeason and COVID, Long Distance Care, Long Distance Care & COVID-19, Long distance caregiver, long distance caregiver burnout, Long distance family impostion, Long Distance Safety Travel COVID, Long Distance travel Holidays, Long Term Care Coverage, nurse advocate, nurse care manager Tagged With: aging life care manager, care manager, case manager, eldercare manager, geriatric care manager, holiday burn out, Holidays calls to GCM's, long distance care provider, Long distance family burn out, nurse care manager, patient advocate

Best Tool for Dysfunctional Family on Holidays- Hope

December 22, 2020

images_20141216-184443_1.jpg

 

Hope is the Best Tool on the Holidays

During Christmas and Hannaka family caregivers, especially in the dysfunctional family can be drinking or numbing themselves from the pain of caregiving. They will ruin the holiday celebration one way or another. Maybe they are drugging themselves with the telly or abusing prescription drugs. Depression and anxiety ( rife among caregivers) are predictors of increased alcohol use. Social isolation, which is experienced by some caregivers, is also predictive of increased alcohol use.

 

How do you as a geriatric care manager change the script for these aging dysfunctional families – family caregivers and older members who are supposed to care for but can’t. How does a professional GCM make the characters transform? 

 

It’s actually simple –but loaded with skill- give them hope. You need to and use yourself to give them hope that things will change. It’s the best tool in a geriatric care manager toolbox- especially on and after the dreaded holidays.

 Use of Self

The use of Self is perhaps the most powerful tool for geriatric care managers. The use of Self provides families with guarded optimism. GCM’s have to offer a vision of the future that is based not only on a desire for hopeful outcomes. This has come from our own clinical knowledge and belief that change to their nasty crippled, family

system is indeed possible.

By being direct, empathetic, and

nonjudgmental, we become a holding bay for

stressed caregivers, creating a place of safety, c

onfidentiality, consistency, and support.

Finally, GCM’s offer our clients a model of

perseverance. By giving up on the possibility of

positive change and by exploring all options,

the GCM enables families to feel that, regardless of the outcome, they have done all that they can to support the older adult.

Be like Judy Garland  on the holiday offering hope


Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Let your heart be light


From now on
our troubles will be out of sight

Give the” Merry Christmas – next year

 

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar  

5 Vital Clinical Tools to Help Aging Dysfunctional Families-Post Horrid Holidays- 

             Thursday, January 21, 2021

  Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday  

 Join me and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stocking.      

Learn how to!

  • Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders
  • Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family
  • Master Vital Clinical Tools, you need to solve client problems
  • Take Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families
  • Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist

 SIGN UP NOW

 

SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL GERIATRIC CARE 1

Filed Under: Aging Alcohol Abuse, caregiver, Caregiver Burn Out, caregiver burnout, caregiver mental health, CAREGIVER RESOUCES, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, elder care manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, Loneliness, Long distance caregiver, Therapist Specializing in Aging Tagged With: aging life and geraitric care manager, aging life care manager, aging parent crisis, alcohol on the holidays, Alcolhol abuse in the elderly, care manager, case manager, dysfunctional family, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Holidays Crisis in aging family, holidays with aging parents, My Dysfunctional Family, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Use of Self

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