caregiver stress Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

What are the 3 Steps to Do a Caregiver Assessment?

October 12, 2019

Where Do You Do A Caregiver Assessment?

Caregiver assessment is best done in the care receiver’s home so you can actually observe the care. It is best completed out of earshot of the older person who is cared for so the caregiver can feel free to talk openly. As caregivers suffer high levels of stress, giving them a separate space to share their feelings is an important part of the caregiver assessment. However, the caregiver assessment should be done in a place that is convenient to the caregiver, which could be a donut shop, the home, or any comfortable venue. If to do the caregiver assessment the GCM must arrange respite, like bringing in another family member or paid caregiver, then that is another way to make this assessment go forward.

How Will A Genogram Help A Caregiver Assessment?

A genogram also helps the GCM assess whether any extended family and friends will make suitable and emotionally appropriate caregivers or not. For example, if a son has a historically strained relationship with his father, is he a good choice as a caregiver? The genogram helps to assess this old family tension and helps the GCM decide with the family as to who can really be good caregivers.

How Does a Psychosocial Assessment Bolster a Caregiver Assessment?

In addition, a psychosocial assessment, done at intake or updated as more care is needed, assesses key abilities and availability of the extended network of family caregivers. The psychosocial assessment illuminates the client’s financial status, including income, assets, benefits currently being received, health and long-term care insurance coverage, and eligibility or potential eligibility for entitlement programs. This information helps the GCM assess whether outside paid care providers can be afforded if needed to replace a family caregiver. The psychosocial assessment also tells about the family, formal and informal support networks, present and potential caregivers, and cultural variables.

Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

Caregiver Assessment- Can it Prevent Caregiver Burnout?

October 3, 2019

Caregiver Burnout is Big Federal Problem

Family caregivers are so many times in a complete state of caregiver burnout. From a policy perspective, the federal government and the long-term care system in the United State cannot afford to neglect the burnout and strain of millions of Americans caregivers any longer.

Despite the rewards caregivers get from giving care we know from years of research that being a family caregiver results in brutal losses. These degradations and deficits include role conflict and overload from the never-ending tasks demanded of a caregiver. Left in a permanent state of worry and anxiety much of the time, caregivers are working in a deteriorating and unpredictable situation.

Caregivers Feel Trapped

Caregivers can feel entrapped by there the restrictions on their own life. They are often beset by fiscal worries because they are not paid except in some states, like California under Medicaid. Yet the caregiving situation explodes in cost through medical bills, medical equipment and informal care that must be brought in, if the family can afford it.

Caregivers Are Not Attorneys

Family caregivers face a quagmire of legal problems including untangling wills, trusts, and inheritance issues which generally complicate care both emotionally and physically. Many times these family caregivers compound their fiscal woes by having to quit their job, running the risk of never being hired again, and that is if they can eventually return to work.

Caregivers Mental Health Ravaged

The caregivers own physical and mental health is often ravaged. They have to do medical tasks that years ago family caregivers never had to do. If they were paid by an agency, this would be a workman’s compensation nightmare for the company, yet these family caregivers are never even paid. So it is time that geriatric care managers and other professionals in aging started to respond to this family caregiver nightmare and use a caregiver assessment every time they assess an older client tended by a family caregiver.

Find out more in the YouTube below from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

Caregiver Assessment- When The Caregiver Loses Sense of Self

September 22, 2019

One Homeostatic System

When you assess an older client with a family caregiver, you really have two clients. The needs of the family caregiver are different than the needs of the care receiver and the geriatric care manager or aging professional must differentiate those needs to make sure the care receiver’s functional and psychosocial needs are met. The care receiver and the family caregiver are one homeostatic system encompassing the whole aging family. To keep that family healthy and whole, in the middle of swirling care crisis, the care manager must first recognize that there are multiple clients including the person who gives or supervises care. In a health care insult, family members who give care are often referred to by the inanimate wooden term “ resources”. They have also been referred to as “ informants “.

Stripping Caregivers Personhood

This stripping of personhood denudes them of their status as individuals and melts them into the caregivers, thus breeds professional ignorance, like the crowd who watched the emperor with no clothes. We are blind to caregiver’s humanity and thus their own needs.

Seld-Esteem Vanishes With Caregiving

Many family caregivers lose their self-esteem because they fail at so many other parts of their lives when their whole life seems to be taken up by caregiving. They do not get vacations as the care-receiver does not take a break from illness and aging. Often there are few others to give them respite. Caregivers, often they just do not know where to find help or even ask for it. If family caregivers have children and husbands, they are often squeezed between their needs, the needs of the care receiver – thus have no room for their own needs. They are breathless and slogging forward.

Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

Caregiver Assessment – Ms. Handy the Burnt out Caregiver

September 16, 2019

The Dutiful Daughter Syndrome

A caregiver assessment can reveal the problems of the dutiful daughter syndrome of who daughters take on all the care because in her family ” that was just her fate” . When the caregiver assessment reveals overload, depression, and or burn-out or a caregiver is thinking of placing an elderly parent inappropriately , then the GCM should come to the rescue with alternatives

GCM Coaching Skills Needed

One other choice can be the GCM using coaching skills to help the main caregiver ask adult brothers and sisters for help. Often the communication between brothers and sisters involving parent care is very poor and weak. Sisters especially need help in asking assistance from brothers, and all need help in asking for assistance from estranged siblings. After the help is requested, coaching siblings to say, “Thank you, and I love you,” and then to set up the new caregiving system, which is an expanded circle of care, is a primary GCM job.

Coaching Sharing the Care Between a Family

The issue of how the family can fairly share the caregiving with the primary family caregiver may be a key issue that can be discussed after a caregiver assessment. To offer the main caregiver respite, periodically one family member could take the care receiver for a weekend. Another may foot the bill for formal paid caregiving rather than do direct care; one may handle all bill paying using an online bill-paying account and have the care receiver’s mail forwarded to them.

One family member could manage a social media group, like a Facebook page, or organize a chat room dedicated to the older adult where friends can communicate with the person. One family member could set up a caregivers’ sharing site such as through Lotsa Helping Hands . One may do a family newsletter summarizing the caregiving month. A family member or friend who is tech savvy could set up all caregiving websites, calendars, emails, and videoconferencing needed by the family. One family member could manage ongoing house repairs for the care receiver. The idea is to be creative, meet the care receiver’s needs, and divide tasks up so that long-distance and local family members can share the tasks according to their abilities, skills, time available, location, and preferences. This is called striking a balance in the family.

Watch Ms Handy Almost Going Over The Edge

Watch my YOU TUBE channel to how GCM coaches Ms, Handy , after a caregiver assessment , when she requested help as an overwrought family caregiver who is is going to place her Dad because she cannot ask for help.

Caregiver Assessment- Here’s What It Takes Professionally

September 15, 2019

Doing TWO Assessments

To meet the needs of the whole family, principally the care receiver and the caregivers, GCMs need to begin assessing the caregiver as well as the care receiver. A caregiver assessment is defined by the National Center on Caregiving at the Family Caregiver Alliance as a systematic process of gathering the information that describes the caregiving situation and identifies particular problems, needs, resources, and strengths of a family caregiver. This new measure means that the care manager must see issues from a caregiver’s perspective and culture focuses on what assistance the caregiver may need, examine outcomes the family member wants for support and seeks to maintain the caregiver’s own health and well-being.

Create a Circle of Care

One resource that a GCM can bring to a caregiving family is what Gail Sheehy calls a circle of care. To create this supportive connection, the GCM needs to take her or his coaching skills and put together a support system around the formerly isolated, solitary family caregiver. The GCM can coach the family caregiver to ask for help so the GCM can assist in reorganizing the family so adult siblings can share in the care of the older client with the identified family caregiver. The GCM is what Sheehy calls a compassionate coach who can help the beleaguered caregiver attract and assemble a platform to keep on giving the care she or he wants to give the aging person.

Caregiver Resources

A circle of care includes emotional resources for the direct family caregiver. These emotional resources could and should include adult siblings. Reconnecting midlife brothers and sisters, through the circle of care, is an important GCM task, as siblings are the longest and deepest relationships in any person’s life. The GCM may have to depend on his or her clinical skills in helping siblings with forgiveness or reconnecting siblings who live long distances apart to add them to a circle of care. Midlife siblings have often spent the last 30 years tending to their own families, so the point of reconnection of midlife brothers and sisters often happens when they are in middle age in the midst of a crisis in parent care. This is where the GCM needs to employ clinical skills in midlife sibling work or to find the resources for the family to help with this healing sibling reconnection.

Caregiver Assessment – Ms. Handy the Burnt out Caregiver

The Dutiful Daughter Syndrome

GCM Coaching Skills Needed

Coaching Sharing the Care Between a Family

Watch Ms Handy Almost Going Over The Edge

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