The goal of my coaching is to empower families to enhance their nursing home care experience. I can help you to reduce a layer of worry, so you can thoroughly enjoy each visit – those precious moments – with your loved one, instead of spending that time focusing on problems with their care.
I work with clients by telephone through one-hour sessions and create a Caregiver Action Plan for them to implement. Caregiver Action Plans are emailed after the session. In addition, clients are also emailed an audio file (MP3) of their session to listen to at their convenience.
Each session focuses on 3 key areas:
1) Enhancing quality of life: this includes an overview of what each resident can expect during their stay at a nursing home and what their rights are, in addition to oversight of: care plans, dietary needs, restorative care, rehab services, and daily activities.
2) Learning optimized ways of working effectively with nursing home staff.
3) Discussion of how to ensure that medication is properly administered, and that your loved one’s medical needs are being met by their primary care physician and other healthcare practitioners.
Your session will help to sort through the myriad of issues that exist with your family member’s care, and break those issues down into manageable, bite-size pieces. Everyone is unique. Therefore, the care plan that someone receives at a nursing home needs to be custom-tailored to fit his or her unique needs. Based on my experience, this does not happen in a skilled nursing facility, where state regulations put heavy demands on underpaid, overworked staff, which is coupled with the driving need for the facility to generate income. In addition, compassion, what I consider to be an essential component in healthcare, is sorely lacking in nursing home care.
My goal for all families that I work with is to be the person who helps them to fill in the gaps that exist within their loved one’s nursing home care, and in turn, empower them in their new role as a secondary caregiver.
