Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

Long Distance Care Provider Help on Mother’s Day

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If you are a long distance care provider visiting Mom on Mother’s day you can give more than a gift. You can make connections with her formal and informal supports to offer on –going buoys to your aging Mom. You can make good contacts with the informal support network of others who see the your Mom regularly (friends, church members). These contacts will be a great source of information when you, the long distance caregiver get back home.

 

Friends in spiritual groups are a really important contact. If she goes to church a synagogue or mosque, maybe go with her. Get the name of contacts there who might help with driving her to services or find out if the spiritual groups has pick up service for elders.

Contact formal supports. If your mother is in a senior activity program in the community, introduce yourself to the head contact and ask if they will give you periodic updates via e-mail or text. For example, my dad was in a social day program. If your relative is in a similar program, have someone in the program report to you on a regular basis. – Text – e-mail, phone calls, stamped self-addressed envelopes -all good.

 

If your mother is in a community program such as one for exercise, art, knitting, or some sort of support group, make an appointment with them and introduce yourself. Set up periodic reports via e-mail, text, mail  or phone.

 

Take home the telephone directory. Better yet use the web. Find the web site of the local Senior Information and Referral program from the goverment’s  Elderlocator . They will give you the Senior I&R contact in your Mom’s area. Maybe get in touch with a senior information and referral professional ahead of the visit. Ask that Senior Information and Referral professional for suggestions any community programs you think your Mom might want to join.

This is the gift that will keep on giving-  improved quality of life for Mom and peace of mind for you.

Care Plan Interventions- How To Do Multiple Sub Interventions

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The GCM or aging professional can recommend more than one intervention to solve a single problem. For example, an additional intervention to assist live-in lover and care giver Sally Hemingway to get respite from caregiving for her male companion Tom Jefferson could be as follows:

Problem: Problem- Caregiver Sally Hemingway is in need of respite

Intervention:

1. Arrange trial day at Elderday day Adult Day Program. This will provide Sally with some needed relief and a few hours to take care of her own personal needs. Although he has resisted the idea of being left at a center, Mr. Jefferson was willing to give it a try, when it was posed as a card group. On Tuesday and Thursday there is an active card group playing bridge. Mr. Jefferson is an avid bridge player. He had been apprehensive about being at this complex because it has a Nursing Home, along with Day programs, Assisting Living, apartments, memory center and a very busy activities calendar. One can come and go from the social program and participate in other activities within the complex.

a. Interventions GCM to a arrange trial day at Elderday Adult Day Program. This will provide Sally with some needed relief and a few hours to take care of her own personal needs. Although Mr. Jefferson has resisted the idea of being left at a center, he was willing to give it a try, when it was posed as a card group. On Tuesday and Thursday there is an active card group playing bridge. Mr. Roosevelt is an avid Rummy player. He had been apprehensive about being at this complex because it has a Nursing Home, along with Day programs, Assisting Living, apartments, memory center and a very busy activities calendar. One can come and go from the social program and participate in other activities within the complex.

b. GCM work with Sally to arrange Trial Day with program manager on a Tuesday or Thursday for cards.

c. GCM to stop by while he is in Day Program, meet Sally for coffee to help her with her anxiety about leaving him.

d. If trial works, GCM will arrange for half day once or twice a week (any 4 hours for $22) to give Sally an afternoon to take care of her own business

e. GCM follow up with Marsha Dowling MSE, Director o the Elderday Social Day Care program.

Because the family and Mr. Jefferson and Sally want Sally to stay as Mr. Jefferson’s care provider you have crafted multiple intervention for respites and multiple sub interventions or steps to achieve that intervention, in this case respite.

 

How Do You Create a Care Plan?-Finding Interventions

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To create a care plan’s interventions to client’s problems you need a continuum of care. How do you find this continuum? As a geriatric care manager or aging professional, you should already have significant experience in this continuum before you open your door for business. A core competence to open a geriatric care management business or any other aging related business is to know your need to know your community’s continuum of care from day one.

As your care plan or the safety net you build or expand around your client web billows, expands, compresses, and changes constantly, you need the real Web to help you keep up. You can access most areas of the continuum of care and all its changes (new businesses, new senior services offered in part through the Internet. You can access your county’s or Area Agency on Aging Web site, which will usually list all the current senior services available in your town. Almost every county in the US has an area agency on aging and most have a web site that lists all the services available to seniors by category, such as nursing home, assisted living, home care agency, support groups, senior transportation etc.

What is a Care Plan?

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How do you combine care plans from multiple assessments? First let’s look at what is a care plan. After the initial assessment information is gathered from multiple assessments, a comprehensive list of the client’s problems and interventions should be generated. This list is called a care plan.

A care plan is a strategy to repair the holes in your clients’ web or safety net. Your client is experiencing problems because the web of support or his or her own functioning has deficits or holes. The care plan suggests a way to repair those holes by recommending the right services at the right time for the right amount of money. As I have mentioned many times, you are Charlotte, the crafty spider from Charlotte’s Web, using the large continuum of care in your community to recommend ways to repair holes in the older person’s personal web. But Charlotte is spinning multiple threads, much like the Internet. More about basic care plans next blog.

 

Pew Trust Study on Caregivers Shows they are Tech Savvy

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A just released stuffy by the Pew Family Trust on Care, Pew Internet Project and supported by funding from the California HealthCare Foundation found a fact professional ‘s working with seniors already know – almost a third of us are family caregivers. That includes midlife siblings, and wives. The much anticipated study found the 30% of US adults are caregivers.

 

Plus the study confirmed another fact that caregivers and aging families know but is now substantiated. Technology and the Internet is a key tool that sibling and more often spouse caregivers use to render care to aging family members.

 

According to the Pew report caregivers are “ voracious health information consumers. They outpace other Internet users often by double-digit margins,

Family caregivers are use technology as a care-giving tool. Compared with their noncaregiving peers, family caregivers are more likely to

• have a cell phone or other mobile device, such as a smartphone (90% vs 82%);

• use the Internet or email (79% vs. 71%);

• have a desktop computer (64% vs. 58%);

• have a laptop computer (55% vs. 51%).

• According to the Pew Report:

Are you a family, sibling or spousal caregiver and use technology? Check out this report.

 

If you are a aging professional, this is important information on how to reach your potential clients.Professional geriatric care managers  should check out Julia Menack’s Technology to Support Aging In Place in the third edition of Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 2011.

 

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