Finding an Effective Elder Care Specialist
Sometimes it’s easy to think that caring for your parents would be easy in case they become invalid at a very old age, but when you’re actually delivering that care you will realize that you are inadequate without an elder care specialist.
Unless you are an elder care attorney and your sibling or spouse happens to be a geriatrician, it will be impossible for you to provide all the needs of your mom or dad or both when the time comes that they cannot function normally and think logically anymore due to a chronic illness, geriatric health issue, disability, or injury.
The living demands of aging people increase as they move along in life. At first, your elderly loved ones will probably just need assistance with the ordinary activities of daily living (ADLs) such as eating, bathing, dressing, toilet use, continence, and perhaps transferring to a chair from the bed or vice versa.
Providing your senior loved ones assistance with their ADLs, however, is just one aspect of elder care. As days, weeks, months, and years go by your parents would inevitably require a higher level of care which you can no longer perform.
For instance, the result of your mom’s checkup with the doctor revealed that she’s started to manifest symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Don’t wait for her condition to get worse because if that happens how can she claim her benefits from her long term care insurance (LTCI) policy assuming that she has one? Or who will assume legal guardianship or be responsible for making decisions for her once she is no longer capable of doing so? Will she like it if you placed her in a nursing home or would she prefer aging in place?
These are some of the important things that you and your parents should talk about while they are physically strong and mental fit. You cannot just make decisions for them in the future because this will not only affect their health care but their life per se.
Where to Contact an Elder Care Specialist
An individual who specializes in elder care can be a geriatrician, an elder care attorney, an LTCI specialist, a caregiver, or a licensed nurse among many others. These individuals may seemingly come from different professional fields but if you study their areas very carefully you will realize that all of them bear the goal of making the lives of frail senior citizens easier and comfortable.
For instance, an LTCI expert is there to help you plan your future health care needs as the cost of long term care (LTC) is not easy on the pocket. It can cost your entire savings which took you hears to hoard. Caregivers and licensed nurses, on the other hand, provide physical and emotional comfort to individuals whose infirmity had lowered their spirits. Elder care attorneys look after the welfare of senior residents in nursing homes and other LTC facilities. Apart from that, they come into the picture when their clients are being deprived of their insurance, Medicare and Social Security rights.
Although nobody can love your parents as much as you do, you have to trust that through an elder care specialist you’ll manage to make their life after retirement not only blissful but very meaningful.