What is a Geriatric Care Manager’s Role in Hospice?
The geriatric care manager serves older adults before they find they are dying. GCM’s work with chronic care clients, some times for years, who eventually succumb to their illness. 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
A care manager is a GPS for both the client and family through the
5 stages, bringing in critical services like palliative care and hospice
caregiver respite and quality of life the whole continuum of care for supporting the end of life- at the right phase at the right time –
Benefits You (as a GCM) will Bring to Hospice
- You (as a geriatric care manager) will bring the client to Hospice much earlier in the 5 stages of death and dying than one month before death
- You will do a Quality of Death assessment to find out the patient’s wishes for a good death
- You will make sure all the critical paperwork is needed is gathered and organized, including:
- Insurance
- Legal
- Financial
- Healthcare
- End of life
Interventions vary according to the phase. The GCM may already have served the client and they are now facing a terminal diagnosis. But a geriatric care manager may be brought in when the family is negotiating through any one of these phases, their work begins with making a determination of what phase the client is in and what services are appropriate for that client at that stage. They are also the best professionals to bring in the quality of life to every phase so that the client can have not only a good death but a good life to the very end.
Benefits You Bring To the Family Friends and Hospice
- You will monitor the client/care receiver’s and family caregiver’s health and psychosocial status and the paid caregiver’s care plan, to improve the quality of care and life for the client and caregiver So That Hospice can direct all it’s attention to the client and assured family
- caregivers needs are being met
- You will accompany the client to all medical appointments and make sure that the 10 minutes cover all questions, that the physician’s orders are recorded and followed, and that all meds are picked up and set up properly So What –Hospice does not provide this and ensures the client gets to all appointment relieves the family of another task and everyone is getting all the correct information from the physician
- You will make sure that the family has an online personal health record or a notebook if they wish So What -The family has a way to keep track of information from many professional involved and passes on the correct information to everyone in the family and they can feel more in control in an emotionally chaotic time
- You will do a caregiver assessment and suggest interventions from the local continuum of care, including support groups, counseling, respite care, and private duty home care So What –You are insuring a whole family approach and the family caregivers are getting the support and respite they need in this frightening time for their loved one
- You will coordinate family meetings to facilitate issues like shock, grief, and shutting down So What- You are a container, allowing the family caregiver to deposit their tremulous at times
desperate feelings in a safe place so they can get help from you and be calmer for the dying loved one - You will coordinate health literacy information and training of disease skills for family So What- You will create a forum for the family caregivers to express their grief, fear and even hopes and demystifying all the unknown medical terminology to make the family feel more literate and self-assured in approaching the medical staff to get the information they need
- You will monitor anticipatory grief in family and friends and bring in resources
So What- You will create a forum for the family caregivers to express their grief fear even hope and find the help they need to so on with the journey to death
- You will review all new medication with family caregivers and care staff- So What-you will unravel the confusing litany of pharmaceutical terminology and make sure the family and friends both understand what med does what, how to set up meds and remind the meds when hospice is not present
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Find out more by watching my youtube playlist on Death and Dying on my channel Geriatric Care 1
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spirituality was the environment and he had been a lead volunteer to build a trail in Santa Clara California from Los Gatos up the steep winding highway 17 over the Santa Cruz mountains to the Lexington Reservoir. He had no family so the care manager asked the volunteers he had worked with if they would visit him at his home. They happily agreed and 300 volunteers took shifts, 24 hours a day to sit with him reminisce, tell stories and sing while he died over several weeks. This is what joy that bringing a spiritual quality of life can offer in dying.
visiting is allowed during COVID or post the pandemic, can give an opportunity to share old memories or look at old photos and give family respite. You may have thought those old photo albums should be dumped but 
