Do You Know How to Use Whole Family Approach to End of Life Issues ?

February 10, 2021

Family Working Together as a Unit

The whole family approach is critical with death and dying. Care managers are often engaged to help facilitate the discussions at end of life, and help family members come together to work as a functional unit.

Understanding the differing viewpoints is critical

Knowing what a parent wants and does not want during the last days and hours of life help define and simplify the role of the family. It relieves the family of the burden of having the responsibility of making decisions which may not be what their parents want, and can also avoid family conflicts when adult children may have differing values.” Proactive discussions and legal planning can help to reduce some of the potential conflicts.

Major Family Issues at End of Life

I found myself with a family member dealing with end of life issues. The

issues were: money as the elderly man would need to have 24-hour care to return home to die and where he would return home, as although the son was unsure, everyone agreed that the son’s home where all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered was the best place.

The most important was should the elderly man withdraw dialysis and extreme measures that were not saving his life. He was competent and had chosen this.

Issues Solved by A FamilyMeeting

All, these problems were solved by two things. The man’s physicians helped him understand the dialysis would not save him from dying. Then a family meeting with hospice and his care managed home care agency LivHome the son and his wife, and myself was set up using the whole family approach.

Hospice facilitated the discussion. The end result was to move to the son’s home, with 24-hour care and Hospice, where the entire family, were gathered in and out all day and the old man died a ” Good Death” knowing that his family surrounded him.

Deliver a Good End of Life- Add Death and Dying to Your Care Management Agency

Serve Your Client until Death Do You Part

Join me Thursday March 11 and learn why End of Life Services Are a perfect new service for care managers

In this 1 ½ -hour webinar you will learn how to

1.Transition the patient/family through the five stages of death

2.Help clients be active participants in their care

3.Give the family/caregiver tools to manage care

4 Provide family center care to caregiver and family

5 Choose the right support services through all stages of death

6.Introduce Hospice and Palliative care and work with their team

7 Use ALCA End of Life Benefits During COVID

8.Use COVID -19 Family Coaching for GCM

Sign Up

Gwendolyn LAZO Harris MA, CT, Seniors at Home, San Francisco and Diane LeVan MA both highly expert care managers, created a seminal chapter “Palliative Care and End of Life Care Manager ” in my book Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family

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.

Are You A Caregiver- Give 3 Gifts of Joy In 1 Kit This Holiday?

December 17, 2016

If you are a caregiver or aging professional that works with caregivers ,here is the near perfect gift for a caregiver – a three way gift to bring joy to an older person, their family and the caregiver- just in time to make it a holiday gift. This a really inventive easy kit that you buy and just follow -created by a care manager who has made this her passion.

My friend and mentee Nina Herndon has her own thriving geriatric care management business for many years. She has devised a brilliant program within her highly successful care management agency- Sage ElderCare- called the Hummingbird Program – designed to bring joy back into an elder’s life. Nina is passionate about giving older people a higher quality of life – not just helping them with their losses.

Now Nina and her staff have developed this fabulous activity kit so that the caregiver and the family can work together to bring joy back to a family member or friend who needs care. And just in time for the season when families gather and give gifts the Joyful Moments Activity Kit. It’s inexpensive and perfect to give holiday joy to the whole family. Time is running out- order it now and really have joy in a holiday.

Caring for the Caregiver-New Yorker Story About Caregiver You Employ

April 26, 2016

I owned a geriatric care management agency for 25 years. I employed doctors from China, nuns who had fled Serbia, many nurses ,accountants and engineers from the Philippines.

Did I I know their caregiving skills, honesty (background checks), ability to speak two sometimes three languages— yes.

But did I know their real background? Did I know they left children at home because they could not make enough money in their native country to feed or even put them through college.

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Who do we really hire to care for our elders? Here is an article from the New Yorker to tell you . Perhaps as an industry and country that demands a two income wage earner, where women must work and leave their kids and elders to the care of often immigrant care providers- we need to know more about these woman and men who care so well but leave their own families.

Are Caregivers Themselves Barrier To Caregiver Assessment?

February 27, 2015

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A caregiver can be one of the biggest barriers to doing a caregiver assessment. A trigger for a care manager to do a caregiver assessment is at the initial intake, when you begin services with the client. You will do a psychosocial and functional assessment on the care receiver and ask to do a caregiver assessment next visit, if the caregiver shows sign of stress and burnout.

But a large barrier to doing a caregiver assessment is whether the family caregiver will pay for this additional assessment process. In the initial intake visit, the GCM agrees contractually to assess the older client. To take this extra step and assess the caregiver makes the process more nuanced and expensive.

The caregiver may balk at both time and cost. One roadblock here is that many caregivers do not see themselves as caregivers but as family, so they may find the assessment confusing and unneeded. Often they do not see themselves as part of the client problem, but the major solution, so assessing them may be rejected. Caregivers also classically neglect themselvesand their own health in favor of the care receiver and so may balk at spending extra money to repair their own safety net.

Are You A Caregiver- Give 3 Gifts of Joy In 1 Kit This Holiday?

Caring for the Caregiver-New Yorker Story About Caregiver You Employ

Are Caregivers Themselves Barrier To Caregiver Assessment?

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