Start-Up Geraitric Care Management Marketing and PR Checklist

October 5, 2020

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

This list was created by legendary former GCM Merrily Orsini, who created the model for Senior Bridge, now Humana, from her own ultra-successful Geriatric Care Management business in Louisville. She authored the chapter, Marketing Geriatric Care Management, inHandbook of Geriatric Care Management Fourth Edition. Orsini now owns Corecubed a Marketing Agency for Senior Marketing Merrily Orsini for more information.

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 develop prospect profiles, mailing lists, key factors in specific communication messages per target audience. Add to marketing excel sheets.

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MARKET LIKE YOUR BUSINESS DEPENDED ON IT DURING COVID

October 22 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm PST

As you are approaching the busiest season for care manager’s the holidays when families visit for the holiday and seeing their elderly parents skating on very thin aging ice

Learn care management marketing that works at all time but especially during COVID so you can:

Consult with and help client’s during COVID and post COVID

Convert Consultation into regular clients

Understand branding

Develop a positioning strategy so the caller chooses you

Understand lead generation in care management

Understand how to do an e-newsletter

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Understand Public Relations Press, TV-Radio,

Social Media Coverage

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The 2 Deadliest US Sites of COVID-19 Nursing Homes & Prisons

May 2, 2020

PRISON INMATES AND NURSING HOME PATIENTS NOT 6FT APART – 6 FEET UNDER

70% of inmates in federal prisons have COVID-19. In Kansas, the Lansing Correctional Facility had a riot of inmates over COVID-19 lack of care or protection It took the rebellion to get the coronavirus testing PPE and care. The Bureau of Prisons in Kansas confirmed finally that 79 staff have coronavirus and 88 prisons and prisoners dead.

Older residents in nursing homes cannot rebel like prisoners. Many can’t even walk. The Atlantic Magazine just published an article, We are Killing Elders Now. The writer states “In at least six states, these fatalities account for half of all COVID-19 deaths, and according to the World Health Organization, half of all coronavirus fatalities in Europe have been traced to nursing homes too. Some of this mortality is linked to long-term-care facilities that are shoddily run or that violate health standards. But most of them are doing the best they can with what they have. And they don’t have much”.

KAISER FOUNDATION NURSING HOME STAFFING AND USE OF PPE NOT REQUIRED IN MOST STATES

Kaiser reports -Staff Screening. It is more common for states to recommend rather than require daily screening of staff for illness in NFs (24 states recommend, 16 states + DC require)

Use of PPE. More states recommend (23 states) than require (7 states + DC) staff to use PPE

Two States that require testing for coronavirus of ALL residents of nursing homes are Maryland where 556 have died as of the Washington Post article. and Tennessee

THE FEDS HAVE NO CMS FEDERAL GUIDELINES OR REPORTING

We have no federal guidelines for safety testing according to an article by the Kaiser Foundation

It is now estimated that 16,000 deaths have occurred in nursing homes and that is without the federal government revealing any numbers and not making available any testing. But the numbers are probably huge- if we could just do testing.

CMS announced it would have a meeting of a “panel” of experts “ sometime at the end of May”. After probably 20,000 older people died and the feds did nothing this shows their sense of urgency about this pandemic’s national “elder cleansing”.

WHAT CONNECTS PRISONS AND NURSING HOMES – CONCENTRATION CAMPS

So, what is the connection between the viral spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes and prisons- 6 feet ? Prisoners and residents, in nursing homes, and prisons cannot social distance. Jails and prisons have human beings crammed together with no choice. Nursing homes have 2 beds or if you are on Medicaid three to a room. Neither group has a choice to social distance. They are ” concentrated” as in concentration camps or death camps.

Do SOMETHING – HELP NURSING HOMES PREVENT MORE CARNAGE

So, as someone who has spent her career in aging, I am calling out to everyone, especially professional in aging – do something. Since the feds appear to be doing little- call your congressman, write a letter to the editor.

BE KIND LIKE RACHEL MADDOW REPORTS LA JEWISH HOME LA WAS

Rachel Maddow suggests calling your local nursing homes and see what they need. Be kind like the LA Jewish Home was to a smaller nursing home LA Brier Oaks. They wanted to test their residents and had no tests and the larger LA Jewish Home had tests and shared them with the smaller as a good neighbor. What they found was ravaging but it also showed caring and generosity. Care and be generous and show the helpless elders in nursing homes in your town you are opposed to -nursing home being prisons or concentration camps.

4 Reasons Dysfunctional Family Fuels Mayhem on Holiday

December 5, 2019

The normal family is the hand grenade compared to the nuclear bomb of the dysfunctional family

When both are faced with a filial crisis of aging parents being dependent and the adult child needs to take over they cower or explode.

How Do You Know a Dysfunctional Family

1. They lack the ability to resolve conflicts

They have frequent psycho-social blockages that prevent the family from growing emotionally. They fail miserably at moving through all family stages and orchestrating family rituals.

2. They Cannot make Life transitions

Most life transitions in the family, like birth, adolescence, and marriage have been very difficult to make, marked by a lack of support from the parents. Every holiday might have been drunkenly ruined. The parental figures are usually not in charge, nurturing or able to establish establishes clear rules. They have never created an excel spreadsheet on tasks to do to orchestrate a holiday. Like a disease spreading down generations, they never knew how themselves, as their parents wrecked the holidays too.

3. There are murky roles in the family

The chief role of the parent characterized by a lack of leadership of the family and the ability to nurture the children. Mom rarely became the high priestess on Hanukkah or Christmas, the family members generally do not believe the parent is there for them and can be depended upon. The dysfunctional family is colored by bloody strained relationships and unresolved conflicts and drunken ruined Christmas memories

4. They inspire great literature

The family is the inspiration for great literature. O’Neil’s wrenching plays A Long Day’s Journey into Night” portrays the most miserable of dysfunctional families. Alcohol, secrets that have been kept by all for generations splatter the pages of this great play like it does in all the ruined holidays’ children of dysfunctional families recall with horror. Prince of Tides a tale of a southern dysfunctional family gives us a timelier glimpse of a family whose center can never hold together and whose blood oozes all over everyone from one generation to the next. Award-winning plays and films, like Tracey Letts August in Osage County about a ruined ritual funeral from hell when Julia Roberts tries to beat up drug-addled, drunk presiding mother Meryl Streep.

Rituals Bring Out the Worst in this family

When Mom does not make the very small things she was able to pull off like the Latkes or the Christmas cookies she always made every Hanukkah and Christmas, someone has got to be the cook and resentments skyrocket – tempers flare – and the torch just might never get passed.

The family is again thrown into crisis. That means someone just has to take over and the dysfunctional family has no model or spreadsheet on pulling off holidays and caring for a parent who did not care for them.

Learn more about how to work with the dysfunctional family in Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition

Adult Sibling Rivalry at Thanksgiving- Where To Get Help?

November 21, 2019

Siblings are The Biggest Source Of Stress Between Human Being

At family rituals, like Thanksgiving next week, adult sibyoutube.com/watchlings often are often brought back together. If you are one- will it be a happy feast?

As Gail Sheehy says 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, 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. Maybe you are about to see your siblings at the coming Thanksgiving feast and anticipate largely ignoring him or her or doing chitchat as you seethe the inside. If you fit this description, 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 adult siblings, nearing or at retirement age, may need to come together again to be part of a niece or 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 Siblings War Film

I suggest you watch Pieces of April, a fabulous Thanksgiving film ( lead Katy Holmes debuts in a standout performance) where the film’s dysfunctional family revolves around adult sibling rivalry. The film is also, in the end. around a catastrophic illness of the aging parent, where the siblings need to resolve their differences.

If you recognize this problem in your own family, seek counseling before coming the holidays engulfs you. Contact the Aging Life Care Association or the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists or to find help before a parental crisis.

8 Steps to Take to Avoid Midlife Sibling Mayhem on Thanksgiving

November 20, 2019

When Ritual Celebrations Turn Into Kick- Boxing

Celebrations, (like Thanksgiving coming up) Mother’s Day, Hanukah, Christmas, and Father’s – any holiday— can be a nightmare with adult siblings and the dysfunctional family. You have to show up, yet you prepare for the daggers or uppercuts – either wielded by you as a sibling.

Tips to Save the Holidays

1) It is a holiday event, not a family meeting. If you want to talk about personal issues, make a date to get together with your angry sister/brother.

2) Remember that it is Thanksgiving and not all about you. Keep a positive attitude for the sake of your aging parent if they are there, your own kids your nieces and nephews and your adult siblings.

4) Call ahead as a team effort to arrange the sharing of the food for the meal, if it is at someone’s home. Call every family member. Do not exclude. Again to build a team effort.

5) Call ahead and arrange to split the bill if at a restaurant – ahead of time- again team effort and no embarrassing credit card bargaining at the table that only brings on more fights.

6) Keep your alcohol in check. You can’t control anyone else but you can control and even change yourself. We all say things we may regret with lots of nervous drinking.

7) Check out in-person family meeting tools and some free online meeting tools so if you have an aging parent you can arrange care between siblings with online after the holiday get meeting- not in midst of holiday visit.

8) Hire an aging life care manager to facilitate a family meeting.

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Ten Clinical Steps to Tame the Turbulence of the Holiday Season in The Entitled Concierge Family

Join me for my free webinar and learn how to come to the rescue of Long-Distance, dysfunctional and entitled families who find coal in their stockings. Give frantic entitled adult children hope when they call desperately call this holiday. Learn the 10 Steps to tame holiday turmoil from Cathy Cress MSW, the author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management. Thursday, November 21, 2019, 2 PM- 3-PM PST

Learn

How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays

How to give hope to frantic children who call, after seeing their aging parent struggling with the rituals
How to sell services to desperate adult child callers
How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos
How to use financial forecasting to prepare for growth during the holidays
Sidestep the Many Care Managers Who Do not know how to work with Dysfunctional Aging Families so the client chooses you

THIS FREE WEBINAR IS NOVEMBER 21, 2019 FROM 2 PM – 3 PM PST

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