Chicago's Geriatric Care Manager Center of Excellence – Since 1991 • Alzheimer’s diseaseChicago's Geriatric Care Manager Center of Excellence

One More Sign of COVID?
I have written about Alzheimer’s disease…a lot, its warning signs and caregiving probably more than any other topic. Even...
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October 6, 2020
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COVID’s Other Deadly Toll
During this pandemic, over 13,000 more Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients have died than expected from these cognitive disorders,...
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September 22, 2020
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Negative Thinking Causes What?
What could be worse than a COVID pandemic? How about the uptick in depression and anxiety that mental health...
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July 7, 2020
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Abuse Thrives in Pandemic
Guest post author Gregory Peebles is a team member at CCM whose work focuses on helping aging adults and...
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June 16, 2020
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Alzheimer’s: A Cure at Hand?
I have posted before that the currently approved therapies for treating patients with Alzheimer’s disease are not really very...
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January 21, 2020
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Alzheimer’s Disease State of the Nation
It is sadly ironic that it was former president Ronald Reagan who designated November as National Alzheimer’s Awareness Month...
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November 20, 2019
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In the Caregiver's Words

Recent Client Praise

What is the one thing that almost all of us have had more of than before the COVID-19 pandemic…time! We may have been industrious and launched into home improvement efforts, we may have binged any number of offerings on our screens, we may have read War and Peace, or we may have spent way more time on-line than we had before the pandemic. Well, this last one cuts across age segments with adults 65 years of age and older spending a fair bit more time at their computers as well. Unfortunately, the cyber criminals have been hyper-industrious as well. The result has been a new type of Malware appropriately called “CoronaVirus”…seriously. For those of you with a Windows operating system, you may be familiar with WiseCleaners.com. It’s an application that provides free utilities that help improve a computer’s operation. There is a phishing website that poses as WiseCleaners.com, but it is called WiseCleaners.Best. The unsuspecting individual who looks to download the advertised disk clean up utility or the defragmentation software during this downtime will actually be opening the door to cyber thieves. The malware will download from a computer the unsuspecting user’s logon information, cookies, contact emails and a host of other “secure” information. Other hackers are sending emails that present as safety alerts from a company where your older loved one may have an account, and the alert contains a link to the new protocols that the unsuspecting can click to visit. Globally, there have been emails from a purported doctor with the World Health Organization that share where there are COVID outbreaks near the user. The same invasion and harvesting of sensitive information follows. Please consider these “health tips” for your older loved one during this time of COVID:
1. Don’t click on links; instead, type the address directly into the browser.
2. Don’t download attachments; especially from sources that you cannot verify.
3. Beware of promotions; this is especially for those that are too good to be true.
4. If it says CLICK NOW, don’t.
5. Don’t give personal info; credit cards, social security, medical information, etc.
6. Safety first; use strong passwords and password management tools.
7. Keep your computer current; all apps and devices should be up to date.
Charlotte Bishop is an Aging Life Care Advisor, Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Care Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago. She also is the co-author of How Do I Know You? A Caregiver’s Lifesaver for Dealing with Dementia.
I’ve written numerous times about distance caregiving, and one of the observations I have offered is that distance is not always measured in miles. But in the present COVID distancing, every caregiver to an older loved one finds themselves with the equivalent of a wall placed squarely between them and their loved one. And we should not really want it any other way, because we all have exposures to potential COVID carriers that we certainly would not want to share with our loved ones. But what can you do for your loved one and for you? Here are some suggestions on caring for your older loved one and you for your consideration:
- Make copies of photos taken when you were with your older loved one and send them by mail so that they can rekindle the memories just as you will;
- Send a copy of a book that will bring back memories, maybe a travel book or a childhood book that was a favorite - or musical recordings;
- Find a local food delivery services that will bring your loved one’s favorite food to their door;
- Schedule a specific coffee time to “get together” with your loved one on ZOOM or Facetime;
- If they still live in their own home, find housekeeping or other services to give them a break or just some social stimulation;
- If you are concerned about their sticking to their medication schedule, there are apps for that, many of them free;
- If they live in a sequestered community environment, call staff at different times of day and times of the week to get confirmation on how your loved one is doing;
- And this is not last in order of importance, schedule some “me-time,” because social distancing is hard on the caregiver every bit as much as it is on the care receiver.
Charlotte Bishop is an Aging Life Care Advisor, Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Care Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago. She also is the co-author of How Do I Know You? A Caregiver’s Lifesaver for Dealing with Dementia.
At the point in life when one of the family steps up to be a caregiver to an aging parent, all the "children" have already grown and flown the nest. But as siblings begin to communicate and delegate to help mom or dad, there can be a lot of the same sibling issues that may have been there when everyone was a lot younger and lived under the same roof. The result can be inequity in the duties expected of each of the siblings and a lot of stress for everyone. But it does not have to be that way if the family can set up some rules for communicating and sharing the caregiving load. Here are some useful "Do's" and "Don'ts":
Charlotte Bishop is a Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Case Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago. Please email your questions to ccbishop@creativecasemanagement.com. Visit our For The Caregiver page for more information and resources.
If you are a caregiver, you probably have talked with your older loved one in person or on the phone. You also may have swapped letters in the mail, but chances are that you have not been emailing...let alone texting mom or dad. Yet, all of that is changing. Now that we are starting off into 2014, we are seeing a clear majority of adults 65 years of age on the internet...and that bar may have been cleared as early as 2012. That certainly changes how some of we caregivers are communicating with mom or dad at distance. Here is the rest of the story. Nearly two of five 65+ year old internet users also are on Facebook. Half of these access their Facebook page on any given day. And nearly 90% of internet users age 65 and older are sending and receiving e-mail messages half of the time. As recently as 2010, only about 57% of adults 65 years of age and older had a cell phone, but that has increased to almost three in four adults of retirement age with mobile phones. Among those 76 and older the rate of cell phone use is approaching two out of every three of this cohort. The major problem older adults today face is the employment into retirement chasm - a technology divide. Those who are in the labor market tend to take for granted that what they learn at work to a large extent is what they also embrace in some form or another at home. So, now move beyond the retirement launch and one no longer has access to the latest technology that an employer used to provide. It is not age that takes individuals out of the electronic communication loop. The simple transition to retirement exacerbates a digital divide. So, encourage your parents to be both videoconference experts and gamers. Help them to Skype or find the latest in webcam technology so that they and their grandchildren can stay in touch and in view. And as the grandkids grow, encourage the grandparents to purchase gaming technology like Wii. They, of course, can use the latest gaming platform to engage the grandchildren, but they also will find gaming opportunities that will help them to maintain physical agility. This latter option is what a trainer I know calls "muscle confusion." Using different games on a rotating basis - or at the fitness center different machines and moves - will help the muscles maintain important agility and strength. Both of these will help to preserve the "spring in the step" as well as strength and endurance. Getting back to staying in touch with the grandchildren, the more that your older loved one stays in touch with what is current the more they will feel relevant and engaged. All f this helps t maintain physical vigor as well as ward off the most common concomitant of getting older...depression. So, technology for younger individuals may be about being cool and in touch, but for your older loved ones it also is about being connected and healthy. Keep connected...be the bridge. Charlotte Bishop is a Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Care Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago. Please email your questions to info@creativecaremanagement.com.
What do ObamaCare and geriatric care managers have in common? You probably have heard a whole lot about what is called ObamaCare - more accurately the Affordable Care Act - but you probably have not heard so much about geriatric care managers...let alone geriatric care managers and the Affordable Care Act. It works like this. The new law that has given more access to more Americans has also worked to have everyone in health care working toward the same goal. Raise your hand if you have ever had an older loved one admitted to a hospital. When that event happened, what you wanted most was to get your loved one safely recovered from what brought them to the hospital and to get them discharged. At the point they were discharged, what you wanted least was to face the prospect of seeing them readmitted to a hospital. Unfortunately for the Medicare-age population, that readmission was happening a lot. So, ObamaCare built in a program where everyone is working toward keeping older people healthy once they are discharged from the hospital. But let me take you back a number of years. There was a time when all health care providers - including hospitals - were paid fee-for-service. Every office visit, every hospital visit, every procedure was a charge, and the providers were paid more for more volume. Then some of the rules changed so that health care was "managed" by insurers who made more money if they paid providers less. The first system rewarded volume, and the second one rewarded cutting care. Under the new model, providers and hospitals are rewarded for working together to improve quality and efficiency. And what do the people running these new organizations say is most instrumental in making all this work? In a survey conducted this last year among executives of ACOs, they were asked what was most effective and most important in keeping people healthy and out of hospitals: telemedicine, pharmaceuticals, electronic medical record-keeping, pharmaceuticals, home health care or care managers? It is not computers, it is not the providers, it is not new medicines; it is care managers who are viewed as both more effective and more important. What makes it all work better are the care managers who can assess a person's health and their home, and then develop a plan to help a person get back on their feet. That same care manager is the one who will advocate on behalf of an older patient to get help at home or to get in to see a doctor to help avoid an unnecessary trip to the hospital. This is not to toot our own horns; we will leave that to the CEOs at the new health plans to do that for us. Charlotte Bishop is a Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Care Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago. Please email your questions to info@creativecaremanagement.com.
I have really lost track of how many conversations and/or blog postings I have had about Caregiver Stress. As a certified geriatric care manager, we work with families, and a substantial part of my focus is upon the stress of a caregiver trying to both deal with a loved one's eroding health, but also the demands on them from the others who depend on them. I would like to devote a bit of space here to addressing the stress of the aging loved one and how a caregiver can help them to cope with what life throws their way. Retirement is a break from the stressors of a workaday world, to be sure. But as one lives to do what one wishes as a reward from a long career, there comes a time when new stressors emerge. There can be increasing physical challenges from a medical condition that is not going to get better. Many of these conditions like arthritis, cardiovascular or pulmonary issues just get worse with time. As a person becomes less and less able to do the things they used to do to take care of themselves, the stress mounts. Other very common stressors are those that come with needing an elder caregiver, a spouse or partner to help with every day tasks; it takes an increasing toll. With general changes in health status can come a profoundly diminished sense of well-being and just plain depression. So much for the Golden Years. As a caregiver, look for these warning signs of excessive stress in one or both of your older loved ones:
- signs of anxiety, undue worry or outright panic attacks
- irritability or angry outbursts
- sadness, melancholy or lethargy
- indecisiveness or difficulty focusing
- difficulty getting to sleep or staying asleep
- an array of aches, pains or other issues of nonspecific origin
- rashes, breathing problems or other "new" allergies
- drinking or eating too much or too little; or
- an increasing number of prescription or OTC medications on hand.
As a caregiver, you can help by helping your loved one to find a remedy for the stress. There is no absolute way to rid ourselves of all stress at any age, but the key is finding help to cope more effectively with the stress in our lives. For your older loved one, consider:
1. Gently and persistently encouraging your loved one to be more socially engaged with friends, clubs or outings in order to get a break from the stress cycle;
2. Help your loved one to find seek out talk therapy; it is not about getting another prescription nearly as much as "unloading" to a trained therapist;
3. Seeking a physical aid in the form of gentle massage therapy, exercise classes like yoga, relaxation therapy or just getting out for longer walks.
Charlotte Bishop is a Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Care Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago. Please email your questions to info@creativecasemanagement.com.