May in National Aging Life Care Month

Most days we love our work as aging life care managers at Riverside Care Advisors.  We feel that we add a positive and meaningful contribution to the massive and mostly unexpected challenges of aging in the United States.  For the most part, our culture is not one that allows for families and communities to take care of one another as our elders age, become ill, and need support.  Instead, there is a broken long term care system that has to be pieced together by those in the throws of dealing with an illness, or decline, that they couldn’t plan for.  There are many people in different corners of the health care system providing guidance and feedback to those making major decisions about long term care options, living environments, etc and it’s hard to know who to trust with all the various and often conflicting information being offered.

There are many people, in various roles relating to elder care and living options, who are well-meaning, educated and want to offer guidance and assistance.  However, we find that often times this information is compartmentalized to one area of care. For example, an assisted living only sees folks at a time when they are coming from their homes and are beginning to need some assistance up through the point where they need too much care to be managed in that setting.  Along the same line, those working in private duty home care have a solid understanding of challenges faced by those living in their home who need assistance, but don’t necessarily see those people along the rest of their journey when their illness may require them to leave the home and seek alternate living arrangements where their needs could be better met.  Nursing home professionals also have their own perspective on the aging process that can be very specialized to institutionalized care and may not have the greater picture of what led up to their residents being admitted into their facilities.

Now, we do not fault professionals working in home care, assisted living facilities, nursing facilities, or in the community with elders in any way. We have worked with some of the most compassionate people in all areas of elder health.  Many of the people that chose to go into the field of caring for elders, do so as a result of their own stories of managing or caring for their own elder loved ones. These people have seen a lot and some have more years of experience than we do.  What makes the work that aging life care professionals do unique is that we have the bonus of seeing elders at all different stages and levels of care on a regular basis. We have the advantage of experiencing first hand through our work what it looks like to help an elder who isn’t ready to move from their beloved home to an assisted living facility.  We know the challenges elders face when they need nursing home care because we are often the ones calling and advocating for a nursing home to accept our clients and being denied because there are “no beds available” or that they “can’t meet their needs”. Aging Life Care Professionals get the calls from families when they run out of money at an assisted living facility, or their loved ones care becomes so great that the assisted living where they reside is telling them they can no longer meet their needs.  These are the situations when an aging life care professional steps in to help the families put the pieces back together again which we are able to do from our very broad and extensive experience with seeing the entire spectrum of care and services available and knowledge of the significant limitations that exist. Aging Life Care Professionals often step in when there are absolutely no good options left, and our role is to help families find the highest possible quality of life within those options.

At Riverside Care Advisors we are grateful for the opportunity to develop relationships with our clients, often during some of the most difficult times of their lives and frequently remain on the journey until the end of life.  We stand by our clients and their families as they make transitions through the levels of care, through medical complications, devastating diagnosis, and disease progression. We feel blessed to have found a profession that makes an impact on improving our clients and their families quality of life in any way, big or small  as they navigate the journey through “elderhood.”