Category Archives: Caregiver Resources in NJ

Elder Care Skills for Family Caregivers

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Skills Needed for Advocating for your Loved One:

Educate yourself regarding your loved ones illness/and or disability.
Communicate efficiently and succinctly with healthcare professionals.
Recognize you are a healthcare consumer and deserve quality healthcare.
Understand you are an important member of the healthcare team.
Give input and ask questions.
Pick your battles and don’t sweat the small stuff.
Realize that sometimes it is the squeaky wheel which produces results.

We all go through varying stages of emotions when our lives have been transformed by becoming a family caregiver. Research has shown there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. All of these emotions are part of the framework which makes up our learning to adjust and cope to our life as a family caregiver while we watch someone we love struggle with chronic illness.

On occasion some become sufficiently angry and search for ways to deal with their anger by channeling it into a constructive endeavor and caring enough to become activists for a much larger cause. Sometimes we will find the energy and passion not only to advocate for our loved one’s well-being but for all family caregivers.

New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Aging Health Issues

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Doctors are faced with questions everyday regarding even the most common ailments. Many people who experience these symptoms write them off as minor and may not seek medical attention when it’s needed. Here we provide you the information you need to determine whether your symptoms may indicate a greater medical issue.

What could it mean when you’ve experienced unexpected weight loss?

• Diabetes (symptoms include weight loss, intense thirst and frequent urination)
• Depression (experiencing weight loss, apathy and insomnia)
• Stomach Ulcer (indicated by weight loss, severe and recurrent upper abdominal pain)

Why is your cough persisting even after you’ve recovered from a respiratory illness (i.e. the flu)?

• Pneumonia/lung inflammation (cough worsens as opposed to improving)

What might the sudden onset of an itchy rash mean?

• Anaphylactic shock; a severe allergic reaction to medication, food or bug bite (signs may include the appearance of hives, and swelling around the mouth or face). Emergency treatment is required!

When might your severe headaches be telling you?

• Tumor (symptoms are blurred/double vision, loss of peripheral vision, instability when standing or walking, nausea and/or vomiting)
• Aneurism/mild stroke (sensation described as “unlike anything you’ve ever felt before, with a sudden onset of symptoms)

When could your chest pain be more than indigestion?

• Heart attack (experiencing severe pain in center of chest, also felt in shoulders, arms or back, nausea and sweating and/or shortness of breath)
• Angina/ arteriosclerosis; hardening of the arteries (symptoms include dull heavy chest pain brought on by physical strain or extreme emotion which disappears with the reduction of physical and emotional stress)

If you are experiencing any of the above symptoms or have concerns about any persistent medical issues, please contact your physician as soon as possible.

Bathroom Safety for Seniors

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

The bathroom and the kitchen are not the only places where your family member can get hurt. Most households have other danger zones as well. Controlling access to these areas becomes an issue sooner or later in most caregiving households.

When you care for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, accessibility can be a double-edged concern. You may want to make some areas in your home “off-limits”, such as outside doors, stairways, closets and other places where important or potentially harmful materials are stored. On the other hand, you may want to improve access to some areas – making tubs and showers more accessible or making stairways and outside steps easier to use.

As a rule of thumb, try to improve access in areas that encourage the person to do things independently as long as it is safe. Limit access when the family member’s abilities and understanding have diminished to the point that he or she needs supervision to be in an area.

Elderly Drivers Gives Up the Keys

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Without wheels

“Many people can drive safely through their later years. As a group, older drivers are typically safe drivers. Drivers age 64 and older represent 14 percent of the driving population but just 8 percent of vehicular accidents,“ says Maureen Mohyde, director of Corporate Gerontology at The Hartford, and co-author of “We Need to Talk: Family Conversations with Older Drivers.”

About two-thirds of older drivers self-regulate or voluntarily restrict their driving to avoid night driving, slippery road conditions, rush hour or other difficult driving conditions, she adds.

As a concerned family member, relative or friend, it’s good to be proactive. There are positive things you can do to reduce driving risks and auto fatalities. The first step is to start talking about the subject before it becomes an issue.

You can broach the subject a number of ways. Talk about heavy traffic or road construction. Bring up news reports of an auto accident or announcement of a new senior transportation service. Deteriorating health, new medications or a recent fender-bender clearly mean it’s time to talk.

For help getting started, check out the free 24-page “ We Need to Talk: Family Conversations with Older Drivers,” produced by The Hartford in cooperation with the MIT Age Lab. The guide and video are available at: http://www.thehartford.com/talkwitholderdrivers/.

Key to any decision-making is driving  frequently enough with your elderly parent, relative, friend or client to know if they should still get behind the wheel. Some problems to watch for include: riding the break, hitting curbs, failure to stop at stop signs, running a red light, getting lost or confusing the gas and break pedals.

Finally, start investigating the options so that you can come to the table with transportation alternatives. Family members, friends, public transportation, taxis, senior services programs, non-profit organizations and churches offer a variety of ways to get around.

Most important of all, when it’s time to stop driving, be sure to let your loved one know they are only giving up their keys, not their lives.

Edlerly Face Fatality Risks When Driving

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

For many seniors, driving is inseparable from independence…
When it comes to auto fatalities, who do you think is more likely to die behind the wheel: your 16-year-old nephew or your 82-year-old grandmother? Your grandmother drives slowly and wears her seatbelt.  Your nephew speeds and talks on the cell phone. So the answer is your nephew, right?  No — the correct answer is your grandmother.

A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University indicates that elderly female drivers have a higher fatality rate per mile than 16-year-old boys. Statistics released by Traffic STATS, a new risk analysis of road fatalities produced by the university, shows that an 82-year-old female driver is 60 percent more likely to die on the road than a 16-year-old male driver because they are more frail.

“It’s not an issue of risk-taking behavior, but of fragility,” according to Anne McCartt, a research official at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.  Older people are more likely to die when they are injured in an accident, she adds, and points out that elderly women have the highest road death risks even when they are not driving — five times higher than the national average.

These figures make sense but the news gets worse. Statistics released this past year by the National Institute on Aging conclude that the fatality rate for seniors is going to skyrocket as the baby boomer generation ages and continues to drive. 

As previously indicated, elderly women in particular will be at risk. The numbers increase because the ratio of women to men will grow from 1-1 for young people to 100 women for every 35 men by age 85.

The goal of the research was to try to determine factors related to senior-driver crashes such as body region injured, severity of the crash and circumstances surrounding the fatal crash.  Results indicated:

Drivers 65 and over killed in car accidents were significantly more likely to die of a chest injury.     
Older drivers were more likely to die after the crash date.

Frailty or pre-existing conditions played a significant role in the deaths of older drivers.
If these predictions are correct, we can anticipate more elderly drivers and passengers and a greater number of fatalities among our senior population in the next decade.           

It’s a frightening prospect but before you take away grandma’s keys, consider the consequences. There’s a lot more to lose than just driving. There’s the loss of independence.

NJ Respite Help for Family Home Health

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides senior care, home care & live-in care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Just a few years ago, workers were likely to need time away from work for parent-teacher conferences, running kids to medical appointments, and staying home to nurse sick children.

Today, workers are more likely to miss work because of the needs of their parents. “Elder care has begun to rival child care as a workplace issue, and companies have started to realize that such support props up not just workers but also the bottom line,” according to the Dallas Morning News.

The National Alliance for Caregiving estimates that one in six American workers cares for an older relative. Caregiving usually adds 18 hours to the 40 hours most workers clock at the office. That means that those workers are working a job-and-a-half. Some companies are now hiring geriatric care managers as resources for employees bewildered by the demands of parents who are no longer capable of living independently. Estimates are that one in five caregivers quits or looks for a less demanding job. And that makes businesses’ responsiveness to employees’ caregiving needs more than a nice thing to do; it makes it an essential thing to do

Brain Fitness…Exercising Your Mind

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

It’s long been assumed that memory loss, slower thinking and eventual dementia are the natural results of aging.

Dr. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, disagrees. The human brain, he says, doesn’t need to decline with age. It, like the body, responds to exercise and stimuli.

Merzenich founded Posit Science, which is developing brain fitness programs designed to improve the thinking abilities of seniors. These self-paced computer programs are like video games, only these are designed to stimulate certain brain functions such as listening and memory. One hour a day, five days a week may increase cognitive functioning by as much as 10 years.

While the Posit Science Brain Fitness Program offers exciting possibilities for enabling an aging population’s minds to keep pace with ever increasing longevity, we’re not dependent upon a computer program to stretch and strengthen our brains.

Engaging in a range of activities that spur new learning as well as participating in physical activities that require an ongoing mastery of motor control will strengthen the brain.

Examples of such activities include:

learning to play a musical instrument or a new language
juggling
dancing
solving jigsaw puzzles
playing ping pong

In the not-so-distant future, senior centers, nursing homes and assisted living facilities may include “brain gymnasiums” along with recreation and exercise areas.

New Jersey Planning for Live in Care

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

 “According to some sources, 60% of us will need long term care sometime during our lives. It is important for all of us to prepare for that day when we will need to help loved ones with elder care or we will need elder care for ourselves.”

“It is simply a fact of life to prepare financially for unexpected disasters by covering our homes, automobiles and health with insurance policies and to provide funding for our retirement. But no other life event can be as devastating to our lifestyle, finances and security as needing long term care. It drastically alters or completely eliminates the three principal retirement dreams of elderly Americans, which are:

1. Remaining independent in the home without intervention from others
2. Maintaining good health and receiving adequate health care
3. Having enough money for everyday needs and not outliving assets and income

Yet, it is our experience that the majority of the American public does not plan for the devastating crisis of needing eldercare. This lack of planning also has an adverse effect on the older person’s family, with sacrifices made in time, money, family lifestyles and even affecting the family’s or caregiver’s medical and emotional health.” National Care Planning Council “The 4 Steps of Long Term Care Planning”.… read the entire article by going to the link below

Please go to the following URL for the entire article and previous articles: Either click on the link   http://www.planforcare.org or copy and paste the following into your browser:  http://www.planforcare.org

New Jersey Help for Seniors

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

A recent report in AARP’s Bulletin Today by Sid Kirchheimer, author of “Scam-Proof Your Life” (AARP 2006), says that with a tough economy more Americans are looking for new ways to bring home the bacon — often by working from home. But far too many fall victim to scams. According to Kirchheimer, the Internet has proved to be a great recruiting tool for work-at-home prospects, allowing scammers to hide their identities and post phony “testimonials.”

An October 2007 report by the Federal Trade Commission says that about 2.5 million Americans — nearly 1 percent of the entire population — fall for work-at-home scams each year, and many are repeat victims.

Here are two of the most common work-at-home scams:

    * “Bait-and-switch” schemes require up-front payment for materials. Victims may pay an initial cost and then not receive the promised supplies, instructions, or “client” leads; or they may receive some goods but then must shell out more for the “complete package.”
    * “Check-forwarding” scams occur when victims receive a check for promised or completed work only to be asked to wire a portion of it back to the scammer. The received check inevitably proves to be counterfeit, and banks hold victims responsible; victims may also face check-fraud charges.

For more information on preventing these scams, go to http://www.ftc.gov/bizopps.

New Jersey Elder Care Planning

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New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

The Process of Long Term Care Planning by Thomas Day

The Seven Steps of the Planning Process

Understanding the natural progression of long-term care and the resources available to help can be an invaluable asset to a family or spouse who are currently providing care or someday in the future, may eventually have to provide help for a loved one. We call this process long term care planning. It involves:

Understanding the Process of Planning

Understanding Care Settings

Understanding Government Long-Term Care Programs

Knowing Who to Contact for Help

Creating Sources of Funding to Pay for Services

Using Strategies to Preserve Assets

Creating a Long Term Care Plan