10 Do’s &Don’ts Doing the Dysfunctional Family Calls Post Holidays

September 5, 2023

Most Calls for Care Managers Post Holidays

More than half of the aging families who call you inquiring about services will be dysfunctional families post-holidays. The great majority of calls will come from adult children. If you want to make the sale during the inquiry you have to know how to handle these dysfunctional family members on the phone and give them enough trust in you to sign your contract and give you a deposit for your services.

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How Do You Get Them To Trust You Enough to Sign Contract with Dysfunctional family Post holidays?

Do Be Objective
Do Use Active Listening
Do Give them Hope you can solve their family problem
Do a two-part inquiry and have the problem defined in the first part done by a skilled administrative Assistant
Do study the problem before you do the second call and have exactly how you would solve the problem ready in a planned elevator speech
Do a complimentary 30-minute consultation
Do not give away the store but outline how you are an expert at solving the problems (moving, keeping at home, Alzheimer’s wandering and a bare outline of your solution
Do not criticize dysfunctional family post-holidays
Do not blame,
Do not take sides if several family members points of view and express them

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Should You Use Features vs Benefits of Care Management?

July 5, 2023

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN WHAT GERIATRIC CARE MANAGEMENT DOES?

What are the features vs benefits of care management? Actually, what are features vs benefits? Think about your last few marketing campaigns. Look over some of the emails you sent to prospective customers or the social media updates you made promoting your brand-new product or service. Read over some of the blog posts you published.

How much of your promotional content is focused on how your product benefits the caller? How much of your sales pitch described what your products do???

TWO MARKETING APPROACHES

FEATURES

When it comes to marketing, there are two primary approaches you can take with features vs benefits. The first focuses on what your product or service is or does – including all the shiny bells and whistles you’ve worked so hard to develop. The other focuses on how your product or service will improve users’ lives. Features tell the customer “what” and benefits tell the customer “why”

Which of these approaches do you think is more effective for the adult children or seniors you market to?

Take a look at the list of features below, taken directly from current advertising and marketing materials.

American Lifetime Self-setting clock for seniors with dementia It is the only one of its kind to include 5 multi-function alarms, with the option to set reminders to take medications throughout the day.

Jitterbug Senior Smart Phone 2 with Large 5.5″ screen, easy to see, and 5 Urgent Response button

umbrella that opens and closes with a button

Each is a feature-a factual statement about the product or service being promoted. But features aren’t what entice customers, ( adult children you market to), to buy your product. That’s where benefits come in. A benefit answers the question “What’s in it for me? or what will help my parent or me the caregiver”. This means the feature provides the customer/client with something of value to them. As a result, this is where most businesses go wrong.

Benefits

The feature of a self-setting clock is that it automatically resets itself & reminds the person with dementia to take their meds. The clock’s self-setting feature stops the dementia client from resetting it then forgetting needed medications & times. The benefit is the dementia patient will take meds on time, will be healthier and the caregiver less stressed.

The feature is the Jitterbug phone is that seniors with diminishing eyesight and memory have a hard time reading text on phones or recalling phone numbers. As a result, medical emergencies, are very dangerous. The important feature of jitterbugs is a large easy-to-see response button that gets them one person who will help the senior even if they forgot the number. This is just like the operator they used to get on the phone. The benefit of Jitterbug is it makes the older person much safer and the family members confident they can reach for help if they need it

The benefit of an umbrella that opens with one button is -you stay dryer in the rain as seniors often have arthritis that can make it difficult to push open an umbrella quickly, to keep dry in the rain.

The best way to understand the true benefit of your product or service or to answer the “What’s in it for me?” A customer’s perception of each feature’s results is what attracts him or her to a particular product or service.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF GERIATRIC CARE MANAGEMENT?

What are the features vs benefits of care management? What if you are selling geriatric care

management to a long-distance son and explain the feature of care management is an assessment? As a result, he has no idea what that is, not being a social worker or an RN. He is just a desperate long-distance son. He wants to know, what’s in it for him. What’s his benefit?

You could say you have a product called “Safe at Home” that will make sure his Mom is getting all the support and care she needs and ( 1st benefit) he will not get midnight panic calls or have to scramble to make emergency flights to solve a crisis, like a hospitalization. Plus you will make sure any problems are solved (2nd benefit) before they turn into a crisis that he has to solve from far away, always keeping him informed (3rd benefit)so he can go back to just being a son. This feature vs benefit sales pitch take a huge weight off his shoulder- answering his ” what’s in it for me”

LEARN MORE ABOUT MARKETING GCM FEATURES AND BENEFITS

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A feature is a fact A benefit tells your customer the advantages of those facts

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features vs benefits of care management?

How to Capture Family Stories from Seniors on the Holidays

December 22, 2022

Capture Family Tales From Aging Parents

Have you captured family tales from older family members? Or have you lost an aging parent and wished you had asked them more questions about their past, your family history, and your childhood? Have you dabbled in ancestry and realized that you could have just listened closely to the stories your deceased parents told you and written them down?

Do not look back! Make this New Year the year you collect the stories from your family. Learn to use 10 reminiscence tools, technology, and techniques to hear family history at holiday dinners and events during Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or New Years.

10 Tips to Capture Family Tales from Aging Parents

1. Use empathetic listening. This means to make all the messages you are giving the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting- all say, “I want to listen to you.”

2. Ask questions that prompt the story but don’t make judgments. If there are going to record the family tale, do it in a way that doesn’t distract or stop the older person from talking.

3. Start somewhere. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story and see if they will follow along.”What was a New Years’ Resolution that you made and kept” ” Do you remember your favorite doll ” What was your first day of school like”

4. Music is just next to memory in the brain shown by Alive Inside So use Alexa, or Spotify, to play 40’s

and 50’s music or especially the -Simple ways to spark reminiscence when you visit older family members :
5. Look at old photos together. Photos trigger memory even with dementia. Choose ones from a period of time the person currently remembers, which could be the person as a young adult, teenager, or even a young child.
6. Play music from their teenage years. It is the background to the most emotional period of anyone’s life and is deeply lined into memory.
7. Enjoy food they like or food that is a family tradition or specialty, particularly ones that have an element

Family With Grandparents Enjoying Christmas Meal At Table

of memory attached to family celebrations. like Mom’s Briscut, Dad’s Sunday Supper lasagna, or “Aunt Helen’s Lemon Cake”.

8. Story Worth was started by Nick Baum, a tecky who was, in a way, a long-distance care provider for his parents in Sweden. He was curious about their past and invented the app based on his own need to gather his family history. My husband is a teller of past tales as a California Highway patrolman, then Hippiedom, then as top marketing director for Pacific Cookie Company, the best cookies here in the west.

Our daughter Kali gave him Story Worth as a holiday gift. He wrote down 40 stories or memories from his past. They were being published by Story Worth in a book, saving in print the precious reminiscence that would have been lost but now is found in a book that was given to our adult children and then generations to come.

This is a brilliant way to capture reminiscence and I recommend it to adult children who want to enshrine personal memories in print that otherwise would be lost when they reach back for them.

9. Life Bio- provides an online template of biography and autobiography questions that have been carefully crafted

10. Quick Voice Recorder to catch the memory on your phone

Use reminiscence as a part of a whole new domain in aging called quality of life or attending to the older person’s need for joy through activities that stimulate the mind. Reminiscence does that- so find out more about how you can increase the quality of life of older people after the holidays and all year long by building a quality-of-life reminiscence program like Nina Herndon describes in her chapter on Quality of Life in Handbook of Geriatric Care Management

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.

The Benefits of a Care Manager’s Role in Hospice

February 28, 2022

The Benefits of a Care Manager’s Role in Hospice?

The benefits of a care manager’s role in hospice are myriad.The geriatric care manager serves older adults before they find they are dying, so know them well. GCMs work with chronic care clients, sometimes for years, before eventually succumbing to their illness. They also work with clients who come to them facing the end of life issues.

Care managers work with 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

Thus the benefits of a care manager’s role in hospice is the care manager is a GPS for both the client and family through all stages at end of life, 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

Feature – geriatric care manager will bring the client to Hospice much earlier in the 5 stages of death and dying than the one month before death when most patients enter Benefit- the client & & especially the family have the support and guidance 24x7throughallstages of dying

Care managers do a Quality of Death assessment to find out the patient’s wishes for a good death Benefit- the dying patient has the death he or she wants

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

Care Manager 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 benefit So That Hospice can direct all it’s attention to the client and assured family caregivers needs are being met

Care Manager 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 Benefit –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

Care Manager will make sure that the family has an online personal health record or a notebook if they wish Benefit -The family has a way to keep track of information from many professionals involved and passes on the correct information to everyone in the family and they can feel more in control in an emotionally chaotic time

Care Manager 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 Benefit–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 Benefit 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 the 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

Benefit- 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

The benefits of a care manager’s role in hospice

You will review all new medication with family caregivers and care staff- Benefit-you will unravel the confusing litany of pharmaceutical word salad 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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