Tag Archives: home care

Respite Care – What Is it & Why Should You Use It?

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NJ Respite Care

What Is Respite Care?

Respite care is substitute care given so that the regular caregiver can take a break from the stress of caregiving. The respite care can be for a week, a long weekend, a day or an hour, on a regular basis or just once. It can be for an ill or fragile adult or a special needs child.

Who Gives Respite Care?

Sometimes respite care is given by family or friends, who want to relieve the regular caregiver. Or, it can be provided by paid caregivers who work for a home care agency.

How Will the Caregivers Know What to Do?

You will need to give them a check list of things to do and emergency numbers. List everything you do and check the references of the respite caregivers. For all respite caregivers, make sure they are comfortable and able to provide you with the assistance you need and that the person being cared for understands the temporary transition.

How Will I Find Respite Caregivers?

You can look for a licensed home care agency, many of who offer respite care services. Depending on the length of the respite, some nursing homes and assisted living facilities may also provide temporary respite care.

Who Pays for Respite Care?

Some local governments help pay for respite care. Check with your local Council on Aging or Social Services Department. The federal government is addressing the problem and may offer assistance. Call the eldercare locator at 1-800-677-1116, Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, to see if help is available where you live.

Why is Respite Care Necessary?

Caregivers are often at increased risk of depression and other health problems as a result of the stress that accompanies being a caregiver. Having respite care refreshes the caregiver and protects them from burning out or becoming ill.

What Else Can I Do to Avoid Burn Out?

Join a support group, get adequate sleep, eat nutritious meals, and exercise daily. Take advantage of offers of help. Providing constant care is a demanding job. It’s crucial for caregivers to take a break periodically and this need is a normal part of the life-cycle of care. Support groups can help with guilt and frustration or just help caregivers keep morale high.

If you are caring for a loved one, you need to take care of yourself so that you can continue to provide that care. Finding quality respite care is an excellent means to an end.

Posted by: Frank Esposito, Vice President of Expert Home Care.  New Jersey’s Expert Home Care provides professional and reliable home health care and companion care for NJ elderly, helping them with their daily living activities since 1984. Please call us toll free at 800-848-2336 when you have home care related questions or need assistance for a loved one. Get a Free Home Care Assessment (a $375 value!) when you mention this post.

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.

Interesting Words of Wisdom

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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.

Inetrsteinig

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. Tthe olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig, huh?

Witty Words of Wisdom

  • Drive carefully. It’s not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
  • If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
  • When everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
  • If you can’t beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing.
  • You are what you eat. So stay away from the jerk chicken.
  • Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.
  • If you can’t be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.

New Jersey Senior 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.

Is Attitude Everything?

Successful aging in New Jersey is an absence of (or minimum of) disease and disability. A new study of more than 500 persons from age 60 to 98 shows that people who think they are “aging successfully” aren’t necessarily the healthiest individuals. Optimism and effective coping tools, or attitude, were found be essential to successful aging more than traditional measures of health and wellness, according to a study funded by the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California-San Diego.

The study showed that persons who regularly read, write and socialize gave themselves higher scores than those who did not. Surprisingly, volunteer activities, which have long been thought to help persons age successfully, were not found to have the same positive influence. The bottom line is that those things leading to successful aging are well within an individual’s control. The key is adopting personal coping mechanisms and remaining as physically, socially and mentally active as possible.

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 Elder Wealth Transition

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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.

Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values

Roy Williams and Vic Preisser. Preparing Heirs: Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values. Robert D. Reed Publishers, San Francisco, CA. 2003.

If you have worked hard to accumulate wealth, you probably want to make sure your heirs don’t lose control of it. Preparing Heirs gives families the tools to successfully transfer wealth from one generation to the next.

The authors, both of whom are family coaches with many years of experience counseling wealthy families, interviewed thousands of families and discovered that 70 percent of wealth transfers fail. Preparing Heirs explains the techniques that worked for the 30 percent of families that successfully “transitioned” wealth.

According to the authors, the key to a successful transition of wealth is family involvement. “The most important single issue that undermines successful transfers of wealth is the breakdown of trust and communications within the family unit,” they write. Using handy checklists, Preparing Heirs discusses how to assess a wealth transition plan, how to fix deficiencies in the plan, how to prepare heirs, and how heirs can prepare themselves.

For mid-size and large estates, this book offers valuable advice on successfully transferring wealth to the next generation and beyond.

New Jersey Live in Care for Elders

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Caregivers provide assistance to other people who because of physical disability, chronic illness or cognitive impairment are unable to perform certain activities on their own. So-called informal care can be offered by family members or friends, often in a home setting. Or paid or volunteer professional care, so-called formal care, can be obtained at home, in the community or from institutions such as nursing facilities or government institutions.

Roughly, 11.1 million Americans of all ages are receiving formal or informal care at any given time. This represents about 4% of the population and is comprised of about 9.5 million receiving care at home or in the community and another 1.6 million residing in nursing or intermediate care facilities. About 25.8 million family caregivers provide personal assistance to individuals 18 years or older who have a disability or chronic illness. And nearly one out of every four households (22.4 million households) is involved in giving care to persons aged 50 or older. About 43% of those receiving care are under the age of 65 and are evenly spread between ages 18 to 64. Children under 18 and receiving assistance because of disability are often characterized under different criteria of caregiving.

Sometimes human caregivers can be replaced or assisted by mechanical devices. These might include special computer systems for communication, special locomotion equipment, remote vital sign monitoring devices or remote oversight monitoring. Continued technology advances may help relieve the time commitment of human caregivers.

New Jersey Caregiving for Elderly Relatives

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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.

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.

 

Elder Abuse

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What can you do to save a life?

The National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA) reported that some half a million seniors nationwide were abused in 1996.¹ That estimate confirmed a long-held theory of the aging research community that reported cases are only the “tip of the iceberg,” and for every reported incident of elder abuse, approximately five go unreported.

Fast forward a few years and a 2005 NCEA fact sheet states: “No one knows precisely how many older Americans are being abused, neglected, or exploited … there are no official national statistics. According to the best available estimates between 1 and 2 million Americans age 65 or older have been injured, exploited, or otherwise mistreated by someone on whom they depended for care or protection.” ²

The National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (NCPEA) defines elder abuse as: Any form of mistreatment that results in harm or loss to an older person. They use the following abuse categories: physical, sexual, psychological, financial, neglect and self-neglect. Because older victims usually have fewer support systems and reserves — physical, psychological, and economic — the impact of abuse and neglect is magnified, often causing a downward spiral of lost independence, serious illness and even death.

So why is it so difficult to track and prevent elder abuse? Chayo Reyes, a retired LAPD detective, instructor for the California Department of Justice, and proprietor of Elder Financial Protective Services, says that many elder crimes are not recorded or researched adequately. This is because the criminal is perceived as having “legal control” over the victim’s estate. Reyes adds, “Crimes against elders are not categorized as such, but more likely recorded as burglaries or domestic violence, and so statistics are lost in the system.”

Most seniors are healthy, active, and alert. Yet, over time, some seniors may experience diminished physical and mental capacities, and may do their best to disguise these losses. Taken together, such characteristics make many seniors vulnerable to miscommunication, misunderstanding, and worse, to being taken advantage of. The fact that seniors, aged 50 and over, control 70 percent of the nation’s wealth makes them a prime target for theft.

So how can you be aware and actively prevent elder abuse? Gerontologist Marion Somers, Ph.D. says there are signs of changes we should look for, such as:

    * Weight: Have they gained or lost weight?
    * Attire: Has their appearance changed; are they taking less care of themselves, and no longer neat or tidy?
    * Personal hygiene: Are they not bathing? Is their hair not clean or combed?
    * Social Interaction: Are they not as social, ignoring the telephone, withdrawn?
    * Voice: Has the tone or clarity of their voice changed?

To learn more about elder abuse — the signs and solutions — the NCPEA recommends that professionals working with, and families caring for elders, watch “Saving Our Parents,” a new and exciting documentary. Winner of the 16th Annual Mature Media Awards Educational & Training Video Program, the film is the collaborative effort of numerous experts and professionals. Divided into easily viewable segments, it contains interviews of victimized families, expertise from various professional fields and inspirational advice and tips. Visit www.savingourparents.com to view clips. Segments include:

    * Predatory caregivers and crooked conservators
    * Financial scam artists
    * Neglectful nursing homes
    * Generations living together
    * The importance of hiring a geriatric care manager
    * Dangerous hoarding disorders that pose health risks
    * Alzheimer’s: Former president Ronald Reagan and his son, Michael’s, transformational experience
    * Tips from elder abuse attorney

¹ 1998 National Elder Abuse Incidence Study (NEAIS)
² Elder Mistreatment: Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation in an Aging America. 2003. Washington, DC: National Research Council Panel to Review and Prevalence of Elder Abuse and Neglect.

Gillian White, Staff Writer
Delphi Health Products, Inc.

NJ Holiday Gifts 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.

Holidays are approaching.. are you grappling with gift ideas for the senior in your life. Let us help you with that! We found several articles that you might want to check out before going to the mall.

Some ideas “Gifts for Seniors” mentioned here are:

  • Blankets, robes, slippers
  • Personal items; hand & body lotions, shower & bath gels, scented candles
  • Gift certificates for gas, restaurants, or super markets
  • Books & magazine subscriptions
  • Towels, Wash cloths
  • Read the full article

Another good article offering senior gift ideas – Christmas Gift Ideas 

It suggests:

  • Offer to clean their house once a week or help them to maintain their yard. 
  • Do you have a child in your household who always needs extra money? Is the child old enough to wash dishes? Discuss the idea with the elderly and the child - You pay the child.
  • Do you love to bake or cook? Bake a cake, pie or prepare a meal for the person.
  • Give a gift basket filled with bath supplies.
  • Give food baskets filled with anything from cookies, candies, meats, breads, wines, and crackers and cheeses and everything in between.

Great gift ideas for your elderly loved one at Christmas!