Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management
If your clients ‘holiday visit from their family was miserable and you are care manager to the aging parents, a family meeting between the adult sisters and brothers might be needed this January. This will help you decide if you need a mediator or you can be a facilitator at the family meeting.
Geriatric care manager’s do facilitation– but should they do mediation?
Although sometimes used interchangeably, the terms mediation and facilitation refer to different processes.
Broadly stated, facilitation requires meeting-management skills, whereas mediation requires conflict management skills. In facilitation, a neutral facilitator enables a group to make decisions and accomplish a task by guiding them in effective communication processes.
The facilitator maintains a collaborative and respectful environment that encourages full participation and helps the group overcome barriers to achieving its goals.
A geriatric care manager should not do mediation unless they have at least 100 hours of mediation training and conflict management skills. They are “ accidental mediators” but can become trained mediators. Find out more.
Read the new chapter on mediation and geriatric care management. Get the new Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition by DanaCurtis MA JD now– or out in Kindle on Amazon in November (to keep up with technology)
Feuding families are what I call dysfunctional families. They blame each other instead of locking arms in a crisis. What do Feuding families do at the end of life? They have dysfunctional communication. Often they do not communicate at all or engage in destructive communication. They see one another as enemies. They demonize one another
They sabotage resolution.
They actively compound already difficult decisions with intractable, interpersonal conflict. They create problems independent of the underlying issues.
What are some of the struggles that these aging dysfunctional families with fractured communication can face.
Aging parents who lack capacity to make decisions have no advance directives, DPOA and a health-care proxy and adult siblings, who must make end of life decisions, can’t agree
Withdrawal of life support with no designate health care agent and adult children and/or spouse disagree
Pain management adult children and/or and spouse disagree.
Mediation is a tool can be a good resource for dysfunctional families at the end of life. It can help with these difficult families face the death of a parent without fracturing the entire family.It can allow an older person die without pain inflicted by their own family.
I will be speaking about this tomorrow with mediator and elder law attorney Dana Curtis on April 19, 2013, at our presentation for the national conference of the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers in Philadelphia.
Our topic is ,”The GCM as the Accidental Mediator: Fretting and Fighting or Feuding: Intergenerational Conflict in the Adult Family at End of Life”, Philadelphia, Penna. http://www.caremanager.org/ai1ec_event/29th-annual-napgcm-conference/?instance_id=546
Why do some families need mediation at the end of life? Mediation is a voluntary process in which the parties, with the help of an impartial third party mediator, work together to resolve their differences or solve a problem they were unable to address satisfactorily without help. These family differences especially happen to dysfunctional families but can beset any family at the end of life. They are faced with overwhelming emotions and decisions that demand that the family work together as a team. What happens to dysfunctional and even nearly normal families during this trying time? They don’t gather as a team. They fight. They fret and they feud. What are the results of this fighting, fretting and feuding in families at the end of life?
Unresolved family conflicts emerge
Dysfunctional families become more dysfunctional
Family members’ grief, pain and anxiety are often masked as anger and presents as conflict (past and present)
Older person dies without resolving important family issues
Older person dies in conflict, not in peace
I will speaking this Friday April 19, 2013, at National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers on “The GCM as the Accidental Mediator: Fretting and Fighting or Feuding: Intergenerational Conflict in the Adult Family at End of Life”, in Philadelphia, Penna.
If you are attending the conference, I will look forward to meeting you.