Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

Warning Signs on Visiting Mother’s Day

PDF-Cover-of-11-10-12My-Geriatric-Care-Management-Agency.jpg

 

 

Take more than a gift if you visit an aging Mom on Mother’s Day. Take a check list for red flags. If you can go and see Mom in person on Mother’s Day, you can check up on your aging mother’s safety while you are there. Sometimes, during your visits, you may hear alarm bells, like piles of junk mail or consistently dirty clothes. Below is a list to take with you when you go to Mom’s house on Mother’s Day, or any holiday. If you do find worrisome signs, this is a good time to call a geriatric care manager to assess your mother. To find a great GCM go to National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers

Clutter in the house
Unpaid bills
Evidence of missed appointments, getting lost, or wandering
Weight loss
Poor grooming

How to Add Psychsocial Problems to Your Care Plan

PDF-Cover-of-11-10-12My-Geriatric-Care-Management-Agency.jpg

What is the next step in creating a care plan? You started with the initial reason the family member or client called you as a geriatric care manager or aging professional. The first assessment you turned to is your functional assessment. After addressing the first problem, you continued creating your care plan by listing the client’s problems from your functional problems.

Next you list the psychosocial problems taken from your psychosocial assessment. Say our Parkinson’s client’s adult children are arguing about whether to place him at a higher level of care or keep him at home. This would be a psychosocial problem and a family meeting initiated by you the GCM or aging professional would be the intervention in your care plan. Perhaps our older client is living with an older woman companion and the adult children suspect her of trying to get their father to change his trust in her favor. That would be a psychosocial problem and the solution would be to identify your Parkinson’s client elder law attorney and, with the adult children’s consent, set up a meeting with the family and the elder law attorney to discuss their concerns about fiscal elder abuse. You do a geriatric depression scale and find your elderly Parkinson’ client is depressed. Your psychosocial intervention may be to make an appointment with his physician and have him evaluated and to identify some activities he could take place in that would increase his quality of life and decrease his depression.

 

Family Caregiving – Is It A Choice or Your Fate? Who Are They

PDF-Cover-of-11-10-12My-Geriatric-Care-Management-Agency.jpg

 

Who are these family members who become accidental caregivers? According the a seminal paper produced by the National Center for Caregiving at Family Caregiver Alliance in 2006, a family caregiver can be defined as any relative, partner, friend, or neighbor who has a significant personal relationship with and provides a broad range of assistance for, an older person or an adult with a chronic or disabling condition. These individuals can be primary or secondary and live with or separately from the person receiving care. The family caregiver does not to have to give direct care but can supervise arrange, or give” a broad range of assistance”

 

Family Caregivers number approximately 44 million, 18 or older provide unpaid assistance and support older people and adults with disabilities in the community. Family members or relatives represent 83%. Most are middle aged and their age’s ranges from 35- 64 years old. Ethnicity vary with 21% for both white and African American, 18% Asian and 18% Hispanic About 1 out of 2 of all caregivers are women. Slightly half of caregivers (48%) are employed outside the home with full time jobs.

The amount of care these family caregivers render varies widely from 8 hours to more than 40 hours. These caregivers give care for an exhaustingly long time and average of 4.3 years.

Spouses who care for their wife or husband at home are, according to Dr. Steven Zarit of the Zarit –Burden scale , between 69 and 73 years old. So they are already somewhat frail themselves to be taking on sometimes complicated major medical tasks.

 

Carol Levine,  a pioneer in the caregiver assessment movement and a female caregiver herself, points out that the broader view we must take as professionals is that family caregivers are mostly wives, daughters and daughters in law. Most are middle aged. .The majority felt they had no choice but to assume this role. It was not their calling; they felt, but their fate

 

Contact

Use the form on the
Contact page to email Cathy.

Email

Connect with Cathy

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”