Geriatric Care Management Solutions

Geriatric care management is a growing service nationwide which can help family caregivers and patients navigate complex, unfamiliar healthcare situations, understand medical treatment plans and find high quality local resources to help parents safely age at home. In addition, these services can provide guidance and support to overwhelmed and stressed family caregivers.

As seniors are living longer with advancing chronic illness, the need for care management has grown as a way to improve the quality of life for family caregivers and patients, reduce unnecessary hospitalizations and select private duty in-home services earlier in the course of illness.

For example, Care Support of America’s care management service called Your Support Nurse uses experienced Registered Nurses as care managers trained in a proven formula of care coordination and health counseling.  Their nurse care managers work on the phone with local nurses to perform standardized home assessments of the patient and will also accompany the patient to their doctor’s office. Each family caregiver is provided a written assessment and plans of action to address specific caregiver and patient needs.

Your Support Nurse is available throughout the country and is especially useful to adult children who are long distance family caregivers. Your Support Nurse is founded and directed by Dan Tobin, M.D., one of the nation’s respected experts in chronic illness care coordination and health counseling. This service has been tested in millions of dollars of rigorous research, including two Medicare demonstrations.

Research has shown that engaging a care manager has a variety of practical benefits to both family caregivers and their parents, including improved communication and satisfaction with their healthcare providers, improved usage of local community resources, better planning for illness progression and decreased time spent in hospitals, and more time at home.

You can learn more about Care Support of America’s service at  www.yoursupportnurse.com, call their toll-free number at 1-866-439-7103.  Care Support of America and Right at Home will be at educational events on caregiving at local Borders® starting in November 2008.  Check your local Borders® store website for locations and times.  

 

Right at Home is a national organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for those we serve. We fulfill that mission through a dedicated network of locally owned, franchised providers of in-home care and assistance services.