Aging Solutions Releases 10 Most Important Things To Do To Help Develop a 2012 Action Plan To Take Good Care Of Your Loved Ones

 
(San Rafael, CA) Terri Abelar, CEO and founder of Aging Solutions, Inc. (http://www.agingsolutions.com), a client-centered care management company for the care of elderly and disabled adults has ten important things to do to set up an action plan and to discuss this sensitive subject with compassion with siblings and parents.
 
Currently One Quarter of Adult Children Are Providing Personal and Financial Care For Their Parents*.
 
According to a MetLife study published earlier this year, the share of adult children “providing personal care and/or financial assistance to a parent has more than tripled over the past 15 years. Currently, a quarter of adult children, mainly baby boomers, provide these types of care to a parent.”
 
10 Important Things to Do To Help Develop a 2012 Action Plan To Take Care of Your Loved Ones
 
1. Knowledge is Power. Learn about the Aging Systems that you will be relying on to help support your aging parents

• Medicare
• HMO’s
• Medicaid
• Long term care insurance
• County aging services
• Department of Public Social Services-In Home Supportive Services
• Veteran’s benefits and services
• Private home care
• Assisted living facilities
• Board and care facilities
• Skilled nursing facilities
• Hospice care
• Respite care

2. Know how your parents want to live, as they grow older
• Use the Parent Profiler from Aging Solutions to open up discussions about what they want and where they want to live.

3. Obtain a working knowledge of their financial and legal affairs
• Offer to help them make sure all of their affairs are in order.
• Use the Aging Solutions Parent Profiler to compile and organize everything.

4. Obtain a working knowledge of their Health Care Issues
• Understand their medical conditions and know what medications they are taking.
• Maintain copies of their Power of Attorney for Health Care.
• Become educated about depression, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes and cardiac diseases so that you know what symptoms to look out for as they grow older.

5. Nutrition
• Know what type of diet your parents should be following and encourage them to stay on track.
• Really push exercise and activities - if you don’t use it, you lose it!
• Look for any sudden weight loss or gain and know what to do to address it.
 

6. Advocating
• Understand that you need to be their advocate at all times to make sure that they get what they want and need.
• If necessary, bring in an outside party to help your family.

7. Professional Assistance
• Find a team of professionals that will work together to make sure that all of your parent’s needs are met.
• Never use just one provider to handle everything such as: legal affairs, investments, financial planning and health care issues.
• Always have a check and balance system in place to protect your parents and their estate.

8. Caregivers
• Understand that care-giving is a very hard job and it needs to be shared by more than one person.
• Only use agencies that conduct full background checks, including fingerprinting, are fully insured, carry workers compensation and use employees, not independent contractors.


9. Socialization
• Understand the importance of not being isolated from the outside world and how it may affect your parents’ mental outlook.
• Find ways to keep your parents involved with other people through regular phone calls, or even a care manager that helps them with medical appointments. Internet communication is great for  some people also.


10. Relationships with Family
• Keep your relationship with your parents as close as possible and use other people to act as caregivers whenever possible.
• Try to get support from your siblings in providing care or pitching in some money to pay for care.
• Once you become a full-time caregiver, your relationship will change and you may not enjoy the relationship you have always had. Understand that your stress becomes tremendous.
• Don’t let your sense of duty tarnish your loving relationship with your parents.
 
 
About Aging Solutions
 
Mission Statement
To promote safe and appropriate caregiving by families and the community through education and advocacy; to renew a sense of responsibility and common sense while respecting, caring for, and protecting elder and disabled adults through education and advocacy.
 
Client-Centered Care Management
For the past fourteen years, Aging Solutions has been providing Client-Centered Care Management to elderly and disabled adults.

That philosophy means maximizing the integration of community-based services at the local level. This minimizes the need to use the already overburdened health care system as the default resource in a client’s life.

The Client Centered Care Management model is a community-based approach that maximizes the use of all existing community resources while minimizing unnecessary utilization of the health care system. This model is one that is increasingly being recognized in the academic literature as valid, and of benefit to both health organizations and individuals.

Each client in the Client Centered Care Management model has a complex care team consisting of (1) a care manager who provides an onsite assessment and who interacts directly with the patient’s doctors to clarify care issues and troubleshoot in support of the doctor’s treatment plan; (2) a non-clinical care coordinator, in charge of team activities and acting as a second liaison with the medical team; and (3) the client’s physician, who has ultimate authority over medical treatment. The ASI team does not itself provide medical treatment, therapies, or home care, or authorize or deny any medical services.

In many cases ASI acquires a new client during a crisis involving a significant change his or her health care or mental capacity. Once the client is situated securely and stabilized, he or she will experience a significant improvement in their quality of life under our coordinated care approach. Our approach is not only more salutary, it is usually more cost-effective for both the client and family and the local health-care system.

Well-executed Client-Centered Care Management organizes client care sufficiently to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency department (ED) visits. Client education will assist the client in making better life decisions in conjunction with their health care providers and support system so that utilization can be sharply reduced while quality of life is enhanced.

ASI’s Care Management Plan follows a social rather than medical model. This ensures that a client’s needs are being met utilizing existing community resources; it changes the dynamics of a client’s quality of life for the better with the benefit of a team of professionals; and it reduces the client’s need to use the traditional health care system. Visit: www.agingsolutions.com
 
About Terri Abelar
 
Since 1988, Aging Solutions’ founder and CEO, Terri Abelar, has been one of California’s leading consumer advocates helping older Americans. She has designed or helped design pioneering programs and services for seniors, and has given expert testimony on elder care issues to legislative committees in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. She has helped thousands of seniors and their adult children deal effectively with the emotionally draining issues that arise when seniors’ needs are changing and their need for services increases; she has also helped families recover millions of dollars in property and assets.

Her expertise on elder care issues is sought by medical and legal professionals and the media, and she is an effective and powerful speaker to groups on contemporary elder care and elder abuse issues. Before founding Aging Solutions, she was a social services supervisor at the Riverside County Office on Aging, where she specialized in elder abuse prevention, and helped develop The C.A.R.E. Program for interagency partnerships that in its first years, saved taxpayers millions of dollars.

As part of California’s insurance advocacy program for seniors, HICAP, she counseled and fought on behalf of seniors seeking benefits denied to them by managed care health corporations, and those baffled by Medicare’s ever-changing policies and rules. Visit: www.agingsolutions.com
 
 
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Contact Information

Sandra Evans

PR Manager Aging Solutions

Sandra Evans & Associates

(1) 4158879230

sandra@andassociates-ca.com