Tag: medical safety

Helpful Checklists for Givers of Care

Home Safety

The most important checklists you will need right away when caring for an aging loved one are listed below.  To print these checklists for use at home, you can access this article from your home computer by going the website.  https://www.giversofcare.org

This website is where all the articles from the Genus App are housed, so if reading from a computer is easier, you can have access from this site.

  • This checklist will help you with the many things to think about when looking for a long term facility for providing care for a loved one.
  • This checklist will help you choose an agency for In-Home-Care.
  • A medication checklist that you may want to use if you are not documenting meds in the Genus™ App.
  • This checklist will help you gather all the important financial and legal documents and information you need to have on hand when caring for a loved one.
  • A home-safety checklist is always a good idea to make sure your loved one is safe.
  • The VA provides some more useful checklists when caring for a Veteran on this site.
Disclaimer:  These links are being provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the genusConnect™ of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organization or individual. genusConnect™ bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content.

Medical Safety for Receivers of Care

One of the most frustrating things to deal with when caring for an aging parent is the many health complications that arise as one ages.   Medical safety is of key concern.  Many family member also acting as caregivers have not had a great deal of experience dealing with doctors and various medical safety issues.   There are many questions that arise, making the whole caring experience a bit overwhelming without the proper information.

Using the Genus™ App

You can document your loved one’s medical conditions in the medical section of the app, list the doctor contact info for that condition along with pertinent medications.  To have all this information literally at your fingertips on your phone is invaluable.   All it takes is one person dedicated to entering the information, and once it is there, any approved member of your care community can easily access this important info as needed.   The end result is caring better, together.

Most important to medical safety is the value of tracking specific medical information inside the app.  Maybe you want to track the patient’s blood pressure and heart rate each day, along with their mood and mobility factor.  All of this is easy to do with the touch of a few keys using the Genus App.

Help in an Emergency

I can honestly say that if I had this app available to me when my dad was alive as we were caring for him with his Alzheimer’s condition, it would have been very helpful.   More than once I was called by the nursing home to say that my dad was being sent to the ER due to a fall or something similar.  Always in the middle of the night.  Then I would go to the ER, sleepy and bleary-eyed, being asked all kinds of questions by the doctors of which I had no answers for.   You see, I wasn’t the family member in charge of the medical information. That was my sister Jane.  She was the medical guru of the family and did a wonderful job keeping track of our parents’ medical conditions and appointments.  But that one person can’t always be available during an emergency.  Had I had the medical information on my phone, as we can do with the Genus App, it would have provided better emergency care for my dad and much less frustration for us both.  I am grateful to have this App to use with my mom, especially the emergency feature: the little red cross.   I have all the pertinent information at my fingertips!  What a relief!!

Another helpful website

For dealing with medical safety, go to https://healthfinder.gov/     Here you can type in the age of your patient and see what recommended health screenings are suggested as well as find out information on a variety of health issues that may be affecting our loved ones.   There is plethora of information here to help you navigate through these complex health issues.

Teaching Our Loved Ones to Ask for Help

rings5Most people want to be independent and do not want to be a burden on the family, hesitating to ask us for the help they need. When dealing with a family member who still has fairly strong cognitive abilities, we can only know where to provide help if we can teach our loved one to ask for help.  Of course we will see some obvious areas where help is needed, but in order to provide the best possible care, we need him/her to be open with us.

Teaching our Parents

When dealing with my father’s Alzheimer’s and my mother’s declining physical health, we had to convince Mom that it was better for us, if she could try to communicate her exact needs to us.   Once she realized that she was “helping” us by asking for what she needed,  then she could do it more easily.   We just needed to turn the tables for her realize that the best way to help us help her, was to be as specific as she could about what she needed.

When Mom saw some of the systems of organization (scheduling, medical, legal and communication) we had in place using the Genus™ App, she could see how knowing what help was needed ahead of time, could help us plan more efficiently and save us time in the end.   Thus, allowing a better quality of life for us all, not just Mom and Dad.  We had to convince Mom that by allowing her children to help with Dad’s Alzheimer’s, she was giving us a chance to give back to them.   She was enabling us to feel empowered about this frustrating and heartbreaking situation.  Again, it took some time for this change to take place, but with loving reminders from her children, she was able to more clearly communicate to us what exactly she needed help with.  This in turn, saved us valuable time as we tried to efficiently manage our personal lives along with caring for our parents.

Four Areas of Safety

But what about when our loved ones don’t even know what they need help with?   Whether it is because of a cognitive decline, or just the fact that our person of care is completely overwhelmed, he/she cannot communicate where exactly help is needed.   It is in this instance we need to remember that there are four areas of their safety to consider.

  • Physical
  • Emotional
  • Medical
  • Financial

It might seem overwhelming at first, but if we break it down into these 4 categories and tackle them one at a time, it is definitely doable.   In the Genus™ App, there are numerous articles, videos, and resources centered around these 4 areas of care:

Physical:  Think basic needs.  Food, shelter, clothing, water.  Also think about their mobility and pain factor, although this crosses over with medical.

Emotional:  Is our loved one getting the social interaction daily that is needed?  How about their mood?  Is your POC staying positive?  Do they need more social interaction?  You can track this using the Genus App.

Medical:  Do you have all the important documents and medical information filed in one place?  Are you tracking any specific vitals that need to be communicated to the doctor?  Do you have Medical POA?  If not, who does?

Legal and Financial:  Who is on the bank accounts with your loved one?  Who is helping him/her keep track of spending and finances?   What about plans for the future?

All of these areas are equally important, but some may take priority over others, depending on the situation and depending on timing.  One thing you can be sure of, things change constantly when caring for a loved one.  Keeping track of the changes is what can make the difference between a more positive experience and a very frustrating experience.  The best piece of advice I have here is:  Keep documenting, everything.  You won’t be sorry.  I found that by using the Genus™ App, I could more easily track the mounds of vital information.  Keeping me from feeling completely overwhelmed. Better yet, feeling as if we really have this situation under control.  That truly is the most comforting feeling of all when facing the challenge of caring for a loved one.  Knowing that this person we love so dearly is getting the best possible care we can provide.