Planning Ahead: How to Reduce Stress with a Care Plan
Going into a caregiving role with a loved one without a senior care plan can lead to a build of up stress and tension. Fortunately, you can eliminate caregiver stress by organizing your goals with a care plan from the beginning. By the end of this article you will fully understand how to devise a care plan for your loved one.
Understand your Loved One’s Needs
To best assess what your loved one’s need are you should complete an informal evaluation of them before you bring external care into your home. Your evaluation will likely take several sessions. Your loved one might become suspicious of you if you badger them with questions. Instead, observe your loved one and mark what their capabilities are with our Care Needs Assessment.
Prioritize their Needs
Take the assessment that you have now completed and analyze it. You will notice that there are some areas in the assessment that are more critical than others. For example, if your loved one is not bathing regularly that is a more urgent issue than them being unable to utilize their telephone. Prioritize which issues are most pressing for your loved one to have the best possible quality of life.
Create a schedule:
Once you have arranged the issues in order of importance, take each item and determine how often it needs to be done. Some of the tasks your loved one needs will need to be completed daily, while others will only need to be completed weekly. Create Task List to ensure your loved one’s needs are consistently met. Additionally, make sure that you include specific times. Your plan will be more effective if it is precise.
Arrange the Senior Care Plan:
Now that you have created your schedule you can determine where you fit in. What are you able to handle? What are you able to realistically fit into your schedule? Be honest with yourself, as many of the issues your loved one is facing will only get worse in the years to come. Once you know what your role is, reach out to your care team and ask their input. What responsibilities do they feel comfortable taking on? Make sure that everyone on your care team understands their responsibilities. Most importantly, ensure that this plan is forward thinking. The way you have written your plan it should be effective unless there is a major status change with your loved one.
Make a Backup Senior Care Plan:
Do not allow yourself to be caught without a plan if something goes wrong. Take control of your schedule. For each item on your needs list you should have a primary person, a secondary person, and an auxiliary person. Utilize our senior resource planner to ensure that all your loved one’s care need are covered consistently.
Having Trouble Creating a Backup Plan?
Caregogi is here to help! Click the link below to download our easy to use Backup Senior Care Plan sheet. Write the name and phone number next to each item on the needs sheet. Make sure that this document is displayed somewhere in your loved one’s home. If their primary resource cannot be there for whatever reason, they should know to immediately contact their secondary resource.
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