Long Term Care Insurance covers caregiver training

A few weeks ago we got a frantic phone call in our office.

“Can you help me?” the caller asked. Always the optimist, I replied, “We’ll certainly try!”

The caller, a physician living in southern California, began by briefly telling me his story.

“My wife had a stroke not long ago,” he said. “I want to keep her at home and care for her, but I’m still working as a physician. I’ve got insurance to help pay for my wife’s care, but the caregivers I have hired need to be ‘certified.’ Can they get certified by you, through your online Caregiver’s Certification Course?”

I reassured the caller that we would be happy to talk with his insurance company to allow them to preview the course and discuss whether it met their qualifications. I explained to him that our company also provides online nursing assistant training, approved by the State of Oregon, as well as a variety of other approved courses. I gave him the link to see more course details, including sample course modules.

A week later, we got a call back from our physician friend. His insurance company had fully approved the online Caregiver Certification course as meeting their requirements, and he was ready to enroll the two private caregivers he had just hired.

Yesterday the phone rang again, just as I was getting ready to leave the office.

“My grandpa wants me to take the Caregiver’s Certification course,” said the caller.

She asked me a few questions about the course, specifically how an online course works and how she could finish her course, and then she shared with me her own story.

“I’m going to be caring for my grandpa, and he wants me to get trained. This online course fits into my schedule, since I can do it from my house or from my grandpa’s house.”

Smart grandpa! I know if one of my family members wanted to become my caregiver, I’d want them to have the training and skills to do it to the best of their ability.

Research shows that trained caregivers can continue to provide care up to 2 ½ years longer than caregivers without training and support. Not only is that worth the investment, but it is also worth the time and effort.

It’s an added benefit, too, if you can get the course covered by your insurance provider, or maybe even your employer.

If you want to explore these options for yourself, contact us. We’ll be happy to help you!

What do we do with Mom? Facing the needs of our aging parents

A friend cornered me at a social even last Saturday night.

“How do I get my parents to agree to move into assisted living?” he asked.

My first thought was, “Do you seriously expect me to answer that question on my way to get another glass of wine, at a party?!” but then, because I am so passionate about helping our parents the best way we can, I stopped to talk more about this.

It’s a question about 1 out of every 5 of my friends seem to be having these days.

What do we do with Mom?

How do we help Dad?

How do we make sure they’re OK, and maybe happy, too?

These are the questions we are all facing in our lives.

There are no “one-size-fits-all” answers out there. But there are some themes to guide us.

Quality of life. For me, this is the BIG ONE. I don’t really care where my parents choose to live. I don’t care whether they get help or not. I DO care if they are happy. If they are lonely, bored, depressed, or seem to have lost interest in life, they need a change. It won’t be enough for you to promise to visit more often – they need a bigger change than that.

Safety. This is the other BIG ONE. When my parents lived way out in the country – on the farm where they had lived forever, with their dogs, cows, goats, gardens, (wells and septic tanks, too), they were “happy.” But driving to the stores for simple groceries meant curving, country roads and at least 20-30 minutes. Driving to the doctors’ office, an increasingly more frequent outing, meant journeys of 45 minutes to an hour and a half, minimum, each way. The wood stove, the well, the garden, the hike from their house to the bottom of the hill to the barn – these things had lost their romance and now just looked like a great place to get injured. With driving being less of a good solution for either of them, how could they safely manage?

For both my parents and my in-laws, the solution was a senior living community. For my parents, it was a matter of safety. They chose a community, still out in the country, of cottages. It has a central “village” of services they can easily walk to, and a van if they need it for longer outings.

For my in-laws who already lived in town it was a matter of happiness. Socially outgoing people, they had lost nearly all of their life-long friends and companions. Staring at each other and watching golf on TV was getting old; the quality of life was quickly slipping away.

I won’t say it was easy in either case. It didn’t happen quickly. But we all agree today: it was a good thing. It was the right thing to do.

Stress of family caregiving adds challenge and opportunity

If you’re a family caregiver you won’t be surprised about the statistics related to stress and the caregiver.

It won’t shock you that the morbidity rate (illness) and the mortality rate (death) are both higher for caregivers than for non-caregivers.

You’ll probably nod at the most recent findings that caregivers experience higher stress in their marriages or personal relationships, too.

It’s a very stressful job, being a family caregiver.

Stress is our bodies’ way of handling the unknown or the feared. In nature it is a useful response to fright or a threat: the heart races, the adrenalin pumps and senses sharpen. The body is ready for fighting or fleeing – quickly. I’m sure you’ve noticed how quick it can happen if you see something in the middle of the road, for example, when you’re driving 60 miles an hour. In an instant you can feel the adrenalin surge through your entire body.

The problem with stress is that emotional situations cause our bodies to react in much the same way. Over time, the stress wears at us physically and emotionally. We may feel exhausted all the time. We may be irritable and jumpy.

In nature, stress is a powerful positive force. I believe that it can become a powerful, positive force for caregivers, too, if we can learn to recognize the early signs of stress – and then take action.

Perhaps your highest level of stress comes from not knowing what you’re going to find each time you walk into your parent’s home. Listening to your body, perhaps you realize that this is the moment when the adrenalin starts flooding, and you feel anxious and out-of-control. After all, you have no control over what you’re going to find, but you know whatever it is you’ll have to manage.

What could you do to reduce this stress point? Maybe you could call first on your way over, so you get some sense of what to expect. Maybe you could get another person – paid caregiver, neighbor, or family member – to drop by first and set the stage for your arrival to be less stressful.

Changing your caregiving relationship to one with less stress very likely will include some of these keys:

1) Get help. If you have felt the entire caregiving burden was on your shoulders, you need to stop – listen to your body – and take action. Set aside your personal sense of responsibility or your feelings that you should do it all, and get help. Ask your family, your church, your local senior center – get help. Knowing that it is NOT all on your shoulders may be the single most important thing you can do to reduce your personal stress.

2) Get support. Support may come from a different place than actual help with caregiving tasks. Support may come from your best friend, over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. It may come from a formal or informal support group of other people, going through some of the same things you’re struggling with. It may come via an internet support group or email support team. It doesn’t really matter where it comes from – support is vital to reducing your stress and giving you the strength to continue as a caregiver.

3) Take time out. Your body’s stress is telling you to take a break. It’s telling you to step back and breathe deeply. You won’t be able to do this on your own. Most likely, you’ll need help. Respite – short term help – is available in many assisted living communities. Many in-home care agencies will provide short term help, too. Look for it wherever you can find it, and take a break.

Listen to your body. Learn to feel, hear and notice when your own stress level increases. Use this new awareness as an opportunity to take action to reduce your own caregiver stress. It’s a vital step to surviving – and thriving – as a caregiver.

Caregiver training essential to delivery of quality care

You need to hire a caregiver for a loved one. Perhaps you have a niece or nephew who needs a job, and who would love to help you. Maybe someone you know has recommended a good private caregiver they have used.

Hiring a private caregiver is a solution that many, many families use to assist in providing care to a loved one. Privately hired caregivers may be less expensive per hour than agency caregivers – and that makes sense when you realize that hiring an agency caregiver involves paying a portion of the wages of a supervisor and other support staff. For many families, the extra price is worthwhile because of the extra support they receive.

But for many families today, hiring a relative, neighbor, church friend or other private caregiver is simply the best solution to a challenging situation.

If this situation describes your current needs, here are some things to carefully consider:

1) Selecting a caregiver: Just because someone is available isn’t quite enough to qualify him as a good caregiver – although sometimes, out of desperation, that’s a major consideration. A good caregiver will have some personality traits that are more important than experience; traits like patience and caring, warmth and a sense of humor. The best caregivers are also creative problem-solvers – that skill allows them to provide care even when they don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing or have never done the task before. How do you know whether the person you’re considering has these traits? The best way is to look at the person’s history. If you don’t personally know this individual, talk to 2-3 people who have known the person for at least a few years. Ask about these traits, and try to determine if this is a part of the individual’s personality. Here’s the key when interviewing candidates: Past behavior is the best determinant of future behavior. This is not, unfortunately, the job to see if your nephew’s rehabilitation for anger management was successful!

2) Caregiver Training. There are no national requirements for training of in-home caregivers. There are some basic parameters for home health aides and nursing assistants, and some states that have specific requirements, but in general, for caregivers, on-the-job training is often the only training they may receive. That’s not enough for you and your loved one. Demand at least a certificate level of training – it’s now easily available, and affordable, too, through a variety of classes as well as fully online through web-based training professionals.

Caregiver training is essential for in-home, privately hired caregivers. They have no support or supervisor to call when they run into questions about best care. Unlike a nursing assistant, there is no nurse down the hall they can contact for nursing or medical questions.

They may have no one to relieve them if the stress of caregiving becomes too great on a particular day, evening or night. That, and the fact that in-home private caregivers often spend hours alone with the person in their care, makes them vulnerable to stepping over the line from caregiving to abuse or neglect. This can be unintentional, as when the caregiver simply snaps and slaps at the hands of a person who won’t stop grabbing at him. It can be refusing to answer a call for help, if it’s been one of those nights and the caregiver simply can’t go assist one more time.

Any of these scenarios can happen, and happen without your awareness. Training – high quality, thorough skills building – can help prevent abuse and neglect while it builds stronger skills for coping with caregiving tasks and with caregiver stress.

Finally, consider training that provides the caregiver with an opportunity for career advancement, or with the ability to get their services covered by long-term care insurance policies. Courses that are provided by valid training organization, especially Certificate programs, will help you and your caregiver receive additional benefits beyond improved skills.

3) Stay in touch with the caregiver. Ask the private caregiver to keep track each day with notes about what he did that day, and what the person in his care required. You can use something as basic as a spiral notebook and a pen. Review his notes at least weekly, and talk to the caregiver about events he records. Give the caregiver your cell phone number and the number of at least one or two other people he can call in case of an emergency. Let the caregiver know that you understand that caregiving can be stressful, and give him permission to call you if he ever feels overwhelmed by the job.

Private in-home caregivers work today for many families all over the U.S. With some good planning, training and support, you can make it work for your family, too.