Tag Archives: Caregiving

The Aging Parent-Multiple Medication Conundrum

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pillsThe intersection of elderly parents and multiple medications continues to be a conundrum for many adult children. It certainly is for my family! Two recent Washington Post articles about medication issues may be useful for the children or aging adults to read and then share with one another.

In Older Patients Sometimes Need to Get Off of Their Meds, but It Can Be a Struggle, physician Ravi Parikh writes about evaluating medications with the aim of de-prescribing some of the medicines that people take. He describes the struggles that can arise when patients hesitate to go off medications that they have been taking for years, because their sense is that their medications are working. People are reluctant to associate physical problems with medications that they already take, so when new symptoms arise, many people seek a prescription for that problem and are less inclined to examine whether or not the new problem might be caused by medications they already take.

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Jane Gross Lecture on Caregiving and Her Family

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Screen Shot 2016-01-12 at 5.17.20 PMLast fall Jane Gross, journalist and author of A Bittersweet Season, spoke about her experiences supporting and caring for her elderly mother. The presentation at Brethren Village, a retirement community in Lancaster, PA, shares observations, experiences, things she wishes she had done, and much more.

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5 Family Caregiving Facts from Pew Research Center

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Pew Family Caregiving GraphIf you provide caregiving support to a family member, take a few minutes to read a short article about Five Facts About Family Caregivers at the Pew Research Center website. The short article offers details from a survey that collected information about participants’ views concerning caring for aging parents, part of a larger Pew project that focused on Family Support in Graying Societies.The image at right is one of the graphs from the article.

The information presented in this report includes data collected from participants about their views on family caregiving in the United States including:

  • the different people for whom family members provide care;
  • the ages at which people are most likely to become caregivers;
  • that most family caregivers are unpaid and not providing financial aid to the family member for whom they offer support;
  • how emotional support appears to be a significant part of the caregiving responsibilities; and
  • the rewards and stress that caregivers experience.

In addition to the graph at the right, the article features several more images that depict survey data and much more information, especially if you click to look at the more comprehensive report. Pew reports that surveys were conducted from October to December 2014 among 1,692 adults in the United States, 1,700 in Germany, and 1,516 in Italy.

What’s Your Caregiving IQ? — Take the Quiz

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Screen Shot 2015-03-12 at 9.27.55 PMCheck out the caregiving IQ quiz over at the NextAvenue website. It includes some questions about how we define caregiving, what we spend on caregiving, and the costs of long-term care. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable and I missed a couple of these.

After each question the quiz shares the answer and offers some detailed explanations. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time.

Those of us with aging parents know that there’s a lot to learn!

Falls, Falls, and More Falls – Part II

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The other day I wrote about elder adults and falls after reading Bracing for the Falls of an Aging Nation, published in the November 2, 2014 New York Times. The author, Katie Hafner, wrote about the extreme challenges of falls for aging individuals. The next day, November 3rd, part II appeared. Katie Hafner’s second piece, A Tiny Stumble, A Life Upended, focused on one individual and her arduous recovery from a damaging fall. Both articles are worth reading.

My Past Blog Posts on Adult Falls

Nursing Home? Be Prepared to Learn

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Medicare publishes this document to assist people in checking the details and quality of care at any long term care community.

Medicare publishes this document to assist people in checking the details and quality of care at any long-term care community.

No one ever wants to think about the possibility of a nursing home. Yet long-term care may figure prominently in many of our lives.

The New York Times recently published two articles by Jane Brody about how to choose a nursing home community carefully. In part one, Nursing Home Unthinkable? Be Prepared in Case It’s Inevitable, she interviews people who point out how the biggest problem for most families is the timing — the necessity of choosing a nursing community with little time for discovery or preparation.

The piece presents a veritable checklist to help a family go about making a choice when true nursing care is required.

Best Quote in Part I

Nursing homes generally have had a bad reputation as smelly, indifferent places where people go to die. But “there are some homes that are better than being at home,” Ms. Leefer said in an interview. “And there are many more good facilities than bad ones.”

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