 In-home Essentials: Keeping Older Adults as Safe, Independent, and Healthy as Possible in their Own Homes
Long Distance Caregiving: Eldercare Essentials for Family Members Living Out of Town
Helping Parents Move: Evaluating Options, Facilitating the Move, Smoothing the Transition
Caregiving for an older adult can present significant challenges for individuals and families. Family members often struggle to understand an older adult's situation, address immediate problems, and manage the medical, financial and functional needs for their parents or loved ones.
Faced with these challenges, many families choose to hire a care manager to address the immediate needs of the older adult. Alternatively, families choose to manage the care themselves. For these families, we offer the "Eldercare Essentials" workshops, which teaches participants the basic building blocks of caregiving in a small group setting. The workshop addresses the often complex and time-consuming questions that can challenge family caregivers, including
- Care planning: how do I assess my parent's health, medical, and financial needs? What are my next steps?
- Financial management: how can I estimate and manage the cost of care for my parent? Are there lower cost or free services available?
- In-home care providers: what do I need to know if I'm hiring in-home care providers?
- Memory loss: what screening and resources are available to me to address dementia, Alzheimer's or other memory impairments?
- Long distance caregiving: how do I handle care for a parent who lives out of state?
- Risk reduction: how can I reduce the risk of injury to self or others?
- Elder abuse: how do I recognize elder abuse, and what can I do about it?
- Residential options: should I evaluate alternative housing options when the current situation doesn't work? If so, how do I assess the options?
- Advance directives, living wills, powers of attorney: how can I avoid costly legal battles regarding medical care?
- Relocation: how do I relocate family members to be closer to me?
Each participant in the workshop receives a Family Caregiver Workbook. The Workbook includes the information we cover in the workshop identifying legal, financial, medical, and health related issues for each individual. As well, the manual guides individuals in creating their own care plan to address these issues and reduce the financial and emotional costs of providing care to parents and loved ones.
Nina Pflumm Herndon (MA, CMC) leads the Family Caregiver Workshop, along with Jack Herndon (MBA). As the principal of Sage Eldercare Solutions, Nina has helped hundreds of families identify and address the issues associated with aging. She was recently named Outstanding Member of the Year for the Western Region by the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers. Jack Herndon, Sage Eldercare's managing partner, received his MBA from Stanford University and helps workshop participants with problem solving the financial management of the caregiving process.
To learn more or schedule eldercare workshops for your organization, contact us.
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