Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

Although home care may seem as easy as finding and paying for a caregiver, its challenges can become nightmares for families.

Many families call us for help because they struggle with what type and how much home care they need, how to get their parent to allow a paid caregiver in their home, or how to straighten out past disastrous home care arrangements.

Involving a trusted friend or adviser of a resistant elder can help, but sometimes only the introduction of an outside professional will resolve the problem. For example, during our first visit we often secure a previously refusing parent’s agreement to accept home care.

Families sometimes find a successful care giving match the first time around on their own or through a home care agency. There are numerous resources on finding your own personal care assistant but, sometimes it is best to leave that to a trained professional interviewer such as us.

Even with such tips and their best efforts, however, families often run into a revolving door of caregivers who are the wrong fit for the parent’s needs, personality and behavior. One dishonest or negligent caregiver can be a nightmare for all concerned. The lack of guidance and oversight can cause so much miscommunication and unsatisfactory performance that a family may prematurely decide to place the parent in a care facility. Which is the exact opposite of what home care is intended to do.

Even a home care agency representative may not always have professional experience in the required medical field, and may not accurately assess the client’s care needs and home environment in person or have the right caregiver match for the client’s needs. Our Chief Nursing Officer oversees all client care plans.

A professional care manager’s skills in matching and overseeing caregivers can help a family make successful home care arrangements. For example, 90 percent of caregivers whom we put in place serve our same client for six or more months. The other 10 percent are carefully replaced.

It’s important to know that you will run into pitfalls but, will have resources to help you find the right home care match.

Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

In 2006, the first wave of the Baby Boom generation turned 60. In the very near future, this, the largest generation in history — all 77 million of them — will come into their retirement years. In doing so, they will transform every aspect of American society.

This generation will not go silently into the good night. They will not meekly submit to retirement, but bend and shape the concept to suit their needs.

The evidence is clear that this will remain an activist generation until the end of its days. To meet their health needs, Baby Boomers will shape home and community support programs rather than look to institutions.

While they will be far healthier and live longer than their parents, Boomers — the richest generation in history — will have the resources to structure the support programs needed to deal with disabilities and remain independent in their own homes.

The sheer numbers of this generation suggest that there will be a tremendous increase in the need for nurses, especially those who work in home care. With this group already in short supply, the question is: Where will America find the home care nurses it will so desperately need?

Here are some thoughts.

The face of the new worker is over 65. One of the most fruitful avenues will be to attract back nurses who retired. This will involve taking a hard look at the reasons why they removed themselves from the workforce (excessive paperwork for example) and it will involve giving flexible hours and reasonable pay.

Second, we should look to create a career ladder and promote those who have worked as home care aides. These individuals who provide the hands on personal care have the right ethic. Most of them would love it if, through some combination of education and experience, they could be elevated to the status of nurses.

Third, we must make home care the preferred profession. Nurses who work in institutional settings will very quickly see the advantages of working in home care. They question should be: Are you good enough to be a home care nurse?

We should give preference to nurses through out immigration laws. Our immigration laws create preference to certain categories of employees who are deemed to be critically important and in short supply. We should give preference to those who are trained, who have the right work ethic, caring and professionalism to work in home care.

We should increase the supply of home care nurses. The shortage of good teachers is what limits the number of nurses that can be trained and graduated by our schools of nursing. Top-flight home care nurses should be recruited to teach what they know in schools of nursing.

The Internet should be used by home care agencies to help train and keep the skills of home care nurses sharp. There is no reason why much of the training of future home care nurses cannot be done virtually. NAHC, for example, offers one such program through the University of Minnesota.

In the final analysis, what is most important is to stress the mission and the values that explain why home care nurses have selected a career in serving the infirm and dying. There is no more noble profession and none which provides the psychological rewards as the opportunity to help others who are ill and in need.

It’s important to know that home care nurses understand what Mother Teresa meant when she said, “Caring for others is love in action.”

Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

They’re known as the sandwich generation, spread — sometimes thin — between the needs of their parents and their children. They are two-paycheck, middle-class couples with both child and elder care responsibilities — a group representing up to 9.4 million American families.

In some recently published studies researchers have found some interesting results. Such as the power of meaning over math.

Although researchers expected hard measures such as the number of children or hours spent in parent care, for example, to rule the stress levels, the researchers found instead that softer stuff — basically how the couples felt about their work and their loved ones — made much more of a difference.

Having a good relationship with one’s spouse protected their sense of well-being to a much larger extent than expected.

Also, they found feelings of satisfaction — not just burden — in many couples.

A real strength of their findings is that couples look for the positives as well as the negatives, and find many of these. And these are couples who live some of the most serious conflicts between work and family on a daily basis.

Commuting as Couple Time

Most of us start our weekdays with a running start at 5:30 a.m., with showers, breakfasts, and sometimes a quick load of laundry before both working parents commute into work.

Some couples like to spend that half an hour to an hour together with no distractions, no TV, no children, no dinner that has to be done, no bills that have to be paid. That time allows them to share thoughts and ideas of how events and things will work out.

Where Work, Family Meet

A new study of 309 couples, comes out of Portland State University in Oregon.

Here are some more findings:

- Couples try so hard not to bring their family issues to work that they tend to err in the other direction, taking work stress home.

- Even though they believe that caring for aging parents does hurt their work, many said they find it enormously satisfying. And one reason is that the support can be mutual, with the elder parents helping out with child care, finances, or just time to talk.

- Of all kinds of help, these couples were least likely to use the formal workplace programs such as on-site child care, resource and referral services, and support seminars. Like other studies, this one found that’s often because employers don’t offer them, or people worry about a career hit if they use them. But it’s also because employees sometimes don’t know they have the benefits.

You can be going along blithely, not needing any help, until you have a child/parent-care crisis. And if there’d been a flier about a support group a week earlier you probably wouldn’t have even read it.

Some couples’ work and family lives changed dramatically. For employers, that means the need for workplace supports may be brief, or an employee may need different kinds of support over time.

Overall, workplace supports helped employees’ well-being. Surprisingly, however, they were connected with both job and work-family difficulties. One explanation is these employees then take on way too much. Another possibility is that it’s employees who are already suffering who turn to the supports, and it’s that suffering — not the supports — that shows up as problems.

The reality is there are going to be times when our family responsibilities do interfere with our work. Work won’t always go on 100 percent unaffected.

But, aren’t good caretakers exactly the kind of responsible, loyal people employers should want?

It’s important to know, you’re not alone when it comes to handling home care issues.

Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

PRESS RELEASE – Shakopee, Minnesota, March 5, 2007 – Aspirience Home Care to sponsor The Alzheimer’s Association and Mayo Clinic’s A Meeting of the Minds, The Dementia Conference.

This annual conference, being held March 24th at the St. Paul RiverCentre, St. Paul, Minnesota brings together national and local experts for a full day of education, information and support.

The event is designed to equip families, professionals and people with early Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias with the skills to understand and address issues throughout the continuum of the disease.

The conference includes an exhibit area, where sponsors, such as Aspirience Home Care, and exhibitors can have face-to-face conversations with event attendees and volunteers.

Other conference features:

• 2007 Research Update by Ronald C. Petersen, M.D., Ph.D., Mayo Clinic
• A keynote address by Michael Stein, M.D.
• Breakouts led by national and local experts.
• Exhibitors on hand to provide information on services available in your region.
• Continuing Education for health care professionals.

In 2006, the conference attracted nearly 500 people, approximately 50% of whom were people with dementia or their family members. This year the expected turnout will be even higher.

It’s important to know, you can partner with a home care provider like Aspirience to help you too.