Geriatric Care Management Blog

It’s about community.  I was just reminded of a very important aspect of senior residential options that can get overlooked in conversations between caregivers and the elders with whom they discuss their residential options.  As a geriatric care manager, I often am asked to facilitate the discussion that a family will have with mom or dad or other loved one as they consider moving out of what can be their lifelong home. 

Let’s start with the stuff we always address.  Surveys among older adults usually tell us there are three important touchstones for seniors making these decisions:

Safety – Older adults can become a bit fearful about going out at night or live in fear of break-ins and more.  Senior residential options offer a very safe alternative, often with security personnel and gated grounds.

Helping Hands – Seniors have had a lifetime of cleaning up the house, mowing the lawn, and more.  Senior residential communities can give them the independence...

Caregiving in this century is not just handholding; it combines the latest technologies with caring to allow virtually anyone to be virtually anywhere they are needed.  As a geriatric care manager I often am in the role of the “person who knows resources” that caregivers and their loved ones can rely upon. 

A new study produced by a partnership between the National Alliance for Caregiving and United Healthcare offers results of a nation-wide online survey of caregivers who are leveraging their caregiving with web-based and mobile technologies.  The survey was based on the responses of 1000 Caregivers at least 18 years of age, who provided at least five hours of unpaid care to an adult relative or friend and had already used some form of technology to assist them in their caregiving.  To see the full report, please go to The e-Connected Family Caregiver: Bringing Caregiving into the 12st Century.   ...

Okay, so it has been five days since you received that box of chocolates from your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day.  And if you did not consume truly massive quantities of chocolate all at once, how do you feel?  The answer is you should feel the calm that comes from lower blood pressure.  This, according to a group of physicians headed up by Dr. Dirk Taubert who did a clinical study on generally healthy people who had elevated blood pressure to find out what happens to their blood pressure if they eat dark chocolate over a period of time.  Very simply, they found that it statistically significantly lowered the people’s blood pressure.  I bring this up because as a geriatric care manager, a lot of the clients I see have blood pressure that is above what it should be.  And I can tell them that the doctors say they should have a diet that regularly includes some amount of dark chocolate.  People with dietary restrictions, however, need to check with their physicians.

This dietary recommendation does not take...

One of the most challenging conversations I help facilitate as a geriatric care manager is to address the prospect of nursing home care among elders and the family members who care for them.  Much of the discussion comes down to point of view and what a caregiver may find important versus what the prospective resident will find important.  In future postings I will also talk about timing and when to consider nursing home care as an alternative to independent living and the options in between.  Let’s first look just at everybody’s points of view for a moment. An article that recently appeared in Seniors Housing and Care Journal compared the opinions of residents and families as well as state agencies on the quality of nursing home care across 89 nursing homes.  We all appreciate that nursing homes are regulated, and that the state surveyors that monitor the nursing home quality of care in most states use a fairly standard report card.  This report card is called the Online Survey, Certification and Reporting...

As a geriatric care manager, I speak with my older clients who wrestle with weight gain as much as anyone younger.  No surprise, obesity has become a recognized, global epidemic in the developed world, and it shows little sign of slowing in its progression toward greater individual bulk and poorer health.  Yet, recently reported research in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society summarized in an article in Medscape on Aging and Obesity suggests that overweight older adults may have very similar mortality to normal weight older adults.

In a study of about 9,000 Australian men and women aged 70 to 75 years old, researchers tracked the mortality of individuals categorized by their Body Mass Index (BMI).  BMI is a measure of the estimated body fat of an individual based on their height, weight and waistline.  What they found shows that overweight individuals who are older do not seem to have worse mortality than their normal BMI counterparts. ...

February is American Heart Month.  Despite the fact that we hear a lot of news about cancer, cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in America today, accounting for just a bit over one-third of all deaths in the most recent reporting year.  To raise awareness and encourage better “heart health” each year since 1963 the American Heart Association along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes for Health and some other government agencies compile the latest statistics on heart disease and stroke. Cardiovascular disease is important to me as a geriatric care manager (GCM), because it disproportionately targets older adults.  In 2007 – the most current year for which we have data – 251.2 of every 100,000 Americans died of cardiovascular...

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced her five steps of grieving for a loved one who has died four decades ago in her book On Death and Dying.  A couple of new authors, Barbara Okun and Joseph Nowinski, have revised these five steps in light of our present day experience of dying which tends to be a more protracted process.  As a geriatric care manager, I find myself spending more time helping caregivers prepare for the death of a loved one than helping them after death has occurred.  The very practical fact is that people simply do not die in the same way they did nearly half a century ago.  We do not hear of folks just “dropping dead” as much as ultimately succumbing to a terminal disease from which they have been suffering for some time.  Modern medicine has given us more warnings of life-threatening conditions and more tools to forestall the assault of terminal conditions like cancer or heart and lung disease.  With that change in how we die has come a need to address the anticipatory trajectory...