Not everyone lives nearby to their loved ones and relatives. If you oversee the care and wellbeing for an aging parent, injured or ill family member, and you live a distance away from them, caring from afar can be a challenge. Engaging the services of a Private Nurse Case Manager or Care Manager can make this a far less challenging experience, while ensuring the highest level of appropriate care, independent living (to the extent possible) and best medical outcomes.
Balancing the Organizational Difficulties of Care
Care for aging persons is an act in organization. Increases in medical needs, services, and appointments, along with declining abilities to perform daily tasks and activities of daily living combine and make day-to-day life something that requires much more time, planning, and effort. For caregivers and those overseeing the coordination of an aging loved one’s living, when combined with the responsibilities and pressures of daily life, the result can be a difficult balancing act and organizational nightmare.
Quite honestly, it is exhausting. Sometimes there are just not enough hours in the day.
When you add distance to that equation, the work of it all becomes even harder.
Those overseeing care for loved ones have a long list of tasks that need regular, even daily, attention. These include things like organizing medical care, booking appointments, organizing transportation to those appointments, making living arrangements, hiring and overseeing caregivers to make those arrangements work, attending to shopping and errands and essential needs and supplies, and attending to socialization and activity to keep the mind healthy.
This is a tall order indeed. There is help.
What is a Private Nurse Case Manager? Find out here: https://blog.privatehomecare.org/what-is-a-case-manager-or-nurse-case-manager/
The Case Manager’s Role in Elder Care
To put it succinctly, the work of a Private Nurse Case Manager is to do the work of organizing and implementing the care and needs of their client. A case manager’s job is to take on all the coordination and logistics of care and daily living for their elder clients.
A Nurse Case Manager (NCM) or Care Manager, as they may also be called, is a medically skilled organizational administrator whose job it is to make sure that clients access all the various types of care and help they need. They will oversee and assess medical care. As nurses with clinical backgrounds, they can make assessments and recommendations regarding care.
They will book appointments and attend them with your loved one. They will help make sure your loved one understands what is being told to them, what follow up or other care or assessments they might need, and they will find, book, and arrange that care. The case manager will follow up with other services and providers, too. They can manage transportation to appointments and services as well.
Very importantly, the case manager will communicate with you to relay all of this to you. You will not need to rely on third-hand information that may or may not have been clearly understood or inadequately summarized. Family members will be just as well informed as the client to keep a clear picture of care.
For elders in a home setting, case managers will go beyond the medical to make sure clients have the services they need to remain there safely. This can include scheduling and arranging home care services such as aides and companions, skilled nursing, and services such as physical or occupational therapy. They will make sure that for those tasks and chores that are not reasonable or safe for your loved one to do themselves, your loved one has a caregiver or service who can perform or assist with that task safely.
Read more about the tasks and services of Private Nurse Case Managers here: https://blog.privatehomecare.org/20-things-a-private-nurse-case-manager-will-do-for-you/
Care, Collaboration, and Working Together for the Best Possible Outcome
Increasingly, seniors report a desire to stay in their homes and age in place, or to at least stay in a community in which they can maintain their lifestyle and independence. Since the pandemic, more elders (and many of their family members) report a desire to live in a place where they have more autonomy over their living situation and maintain their ability to control socialization and visitation. For those people, managed care facilities are not the ideal.
This brings them to consider alternatives that include aging in place or 55 and older communities. With that often comes an additional need for support services like home health aide services or CNA services, companion care, and other home healthcare services. Engaging these services is what makes enhanced and extended independent living possible for aging adults. It does, however, bring with it the need for organization and oversight.
Read About the Difference A Community-Based Nurse Case Manager Can Make: https://blog.privatehomecare.org/what-happens-when-your-private-case-manager-is-a-part-of-your-community/
With the help of a private nurse case manager, working together with family overseers, clients, and home services agencies, the most appropriate care can be achieved. The ongoing involvement of a case manager guarantees that there is someone who has a constant pulse on the needs and care of your loved one. As their needs change, the case manager will adjust that care.
Your care manager will continue to liaise and communicate with you and other designated family members, bringing a level of partnership and collaboration and continuity of care, even if you are not able to be present on a daily basis. Such a collaboration allows family to be family once again, letting you meet your responsibility to your loved one while having the time and freedom to be what they most need you to be; focusing not on the scheduling and organization of life, but on the relationship and bond, enjoying your time together.
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Private Home Care Services offers care management managed by trained, skilled, certified Nurse Case Managers. PHCS services are tailored to the individual and their and their family’s needs. We are happy to consult with you to help you and your family achieve the highest level of care and best living.