Each person and each family faces a unique situation when it comes to how their elderly family members will be treated. Everyone who has a loved one that is in need of senior care has a few things in common despite the unique nature of every situation. These similarities can be broken down into a few general categories. These include a care path, a need for experts, and management. Let’s look at each of these three constants in a bit more detail.
Care Path
Your care path is a fancy term for how you have found that you and your family should best use senior care. This journey never ends, but is always being adjusted and changed to help you get closer to the ideal type of care for your family. Think about your own life for a moment. You need different things now than you did when you were a baby, right? Our needs change over the course of time, and this is true for senior citizens, too. What was helpful for someone yesterday might not necessarily be what’s best for that person tomorrow. Care needs change, and how you decide what’s best, and all of the events leading up to that is your family’s care path. Each family has a different story, but each family has a unique path that they have followed to get to where they are, and will need to follow a path to get to where they need to be.
Expert Care
Even if you never use a professional caregiver throughout your life or the lives of the people that you care about, you will still need expert care. This can be something as simple as your regular physical with your primary care physician. However, in the context of senior care, we tend to look at nurses, caregivers, and other senior care specialists. Having a strong team that specializes in senior care working with you to help you make the best decisions possible is an important part of the whole care process. This might be a doctor’s advice once in a while, or it might be a more intensive and managed approach with a professional care service.
Management
This is the hardest part of the three constants to explain. Management is an all encompassing term. It can be very general and refer to things like how you are going to pay for senior care, or it can be very specific, and refer to how you will ensure that your mom or dad will keep track of their medications and ensure that this part of their care is being kept up to date. Care management can also refer to scheduling appointments, check ups, and a social life. Not only is this a huge topic, it is difficult for many to handle on their own. Caring for another person is tough, especially when that person has advanced needs or disabilities. Having a trusted care team on your side can help to ease the burden of managing your loved one’s care and schedule and ensure that they live a higher quality of life as a result of this.
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