The New York Times yesterday published an article yesterday detailing research that dreams while dying may help may not only be the brain’s way of comforting the dying but their mourners as well
How Can an Aging Life or Geriatric Care Manager Help This Thanksgiving?
Many long distance adult children will arrange for their parents to join them for Thanksgiving then panic at how Mom and Dad are deteriorating. Aging life or geriatric care manager can help in many ways.
Care managers can create a care plan for the older person. If needed, they can also help the family hire ongoing care providers, monitor household maintenance problems, and generally manage the older family member for the long-distance family. Additional ways they can help long-distance family members include:
Arranging regular visit from religious groups if appropriate.
Telephoning or emailing the adult children as needed and sending a monthly report too long-distance family.
Arranging services from the community such as adult day care or meals-on-wheels.
Accompany older person to all medical appointments and going in with the client to see the physician.
If there is a medical emergency and the client is hospitalized going to the hospital with the client and monitor until the long-distance care provider arrives in town.
Set up residential monitoring, reminder systems, medication dispensers, medical alert systems, fall detection,
If you are an aging life or geriatric care manager give frantic adult children hope when they call desperately call this holiday.
Sign up for my free webinar
Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family- 5 Care Manager Steps to Tame the Turbulence
Wednesday, November 18 @11am Pacific Time
Do You Have a Culturally Diverse Aging Assessment Tool?
The United States has one of the world’s most ethnically and culturally diverse populations. This diversity has important implications for the provision of high quality, appropriate social, health, and long-term care services, including geriatric care management. The professional geriatric care manager (GCM) needs to consider cultural diversity, in assessments, care plans, recommendations, and monitoring to enhance the quality of life of his or her clients.
Dr. Gwen Yeo, makes these 8 recommendations so the Aging Life or GCM can enhance the quality and appropriateness of geriatric care management services with elders from diverse backgrounds.
1. Ask questions about the personal preferences and specific needs of ethnic elders; listen closely to their responses.
2. Be aware of your own values, biases, and gaps in knowledge about ethnic aging.
3. Learn as much as possible about the backgrounds of the ethnic clients.
4. Be sensitive and accepting of differences in values, beliefs, and behaviors.
5. Use trained language interpreters and cultural guides if necessary.
6. Modify assessment instruments to incorporate personal experiences, beliefs, and needs of ethnic families.
7. Refer clients to culturally competent service providers.
8. Advocate for education, outreach, and referral in ethnic communities.
Read Stanford University’s Dr. Yeo’s, excellent chapter Ethnic
and Cultural Assessment in Geriatric Care Management that includes a full ethnic care management assessment
Get the new Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition
now– or out in Kindle on Amazon this month (to keep up with technology)
0
Older Concierge Client Facing the Same Aging Crisis As any Elder
Well-heeled seniors in the US are retired doctors, engineers, publishers who ended their careers with great investments but also with defined pensions, a staple of the 50’s now almost defunct.
They may be wealthy but they face the same aging crisis that all elders do, needing care ,facing the end of their life, negotiating thel almost impossible to find central point of entry to aging care.
They deserve the same compassion, service and seamless points of the compass that an aging life or geriatric care manager can give each client.
An aging life or geriatric care manager must just use different branding, marketing approach and hyper- attention to seamless care to find these clients who can afford their services long term.
Find out more in my webinar Learn The 5 Steps to Reach the Concierge Client
Sign up for my new free webinar
Moving A Parent in – Anxiety and Depression About The Move
Considering Moving an Aging Parent into Your Home?
After the holiday when adult children gather and find a parent so disabled that they should not live alone anymore, then consider moving a parent in. I did this with great success in the ’80s as you can see by the photo above. But I teach geriatric care management and knew exactly what I needed to do to make it work. So if you found coal in your parent’s stocking – do not move the coal to your house, consider what changes you need to make or if you should even do this by hiring a geriatric care manager first to help you decide then help make a successful move and living situation. A recent PEW study shows the number of multi-generational households has jumped from 6.2 million to 7.1 million in the last two years — a faster growth rate that the previous eight years combined.
What a Geriatric Care Manager Can Do to Help Your Decide
Before moving a parent into an intergenerational family situation, both a parent and adult child should consider having an Aging Life Care Manager assess the older person with a psychosocial assessment. The GCM can use the psychosocial assessment to assess depression, anxiety both of which may result from such a move after the elder given up their own space, their home.
Losses of Moving For An Elder
An elder’s home reflects their history their own individuality, their privacy, and all their memories. The GCM can create interventions that the adult child can carry out to help with these mental health issues. There are also the issues of loss as the aging parent may after giving up their home, privacy, and history encased in their furniture pictures and the sense of home they have given up.
The Anxiety and Depression of Moving for Elder
The aging parent can bring furniture and photos into that reflect their old home, but the deep feeling of loss, expressed in perhaps unanticipated anxiety and depression needs attention. I would certainly be consulting their primary physician but perhaps, new activities with the family, outside social engagement, quality of like interventions like continuing to go to baseball games, a knitting group, play bridge, attend yoga or travel, as examples.
Blending families does not always go smoothly and his best approached with caution and professional help before all make a decision to cohabit.
A geriatric care manager or aging life care manager can also help your parents get engaged in outside activities by doing a quality of life assessment to find out the activities they enjoy and get them engaged in what they like to do in the community. This was the secret of my success. My mother in law and Dad moved in from different sides of the US for widely divergent reasons. ( pictures in family Photo above).His home was flooded by the storm of the century in 1989 after I had just 
remodeled it and Becca my mother in law was living with the ” Love of her Life” and he had a stroke.
She was by nature a social butterfly. So I got her engaged in a women’s group at the local senior center, chair exercise, the blind center as she had macular degeneration and Sunday’s at the local Presbyterian church.
My Dad was more a recluse having PTSD from World War 2 and eventually I got him involved in the Catholic church, Cindy’s Celebrations local faith-based senior services where he and Becca went to lunch once a week. They celebrated their birthday, took them to great restaurants each week and played the big band music they loved in the Van. I arranged all transportation through our senior transportation LifeLine, both churches provided their own transportation as did Cindy’s Celebration