Care Conversations
Nobody wants to have the conversation. The one where you talk to your elderly parents – the people who brought you up and looked after you as a child – about care at home.
The idea they may have to leave their home to live in an assisted living facility or care home is even more difficult to deal with. However, the time may come when it is necessary, and you have to work out how to talk to your parents – or other elderly loved ones – about care. You cannot force them to do anything they don’t want to do. Still, you know that they need additional support to retain their high quality of life and may struggle with managing their health or their home without some help. It may be dangerous for your parents or relative not to have care support if they are at risk of falls or are unable to cook food for themselves anymore. And you are in a position where you need to communicate with them about that.
Here are 4 simple tips to help begin the Care Conversation with your loved ones:
- Timing and location – choose a time when you and your loved one are relaxed and in a comfortable environment. This will make it easier to listen to each other and be open. If your loved one doesn’t want to talk about the topic when you first bring it up, try again later.
- Plan what you want to say – knowing what you need to discuss beforehand can make sure that you have a focus to the conversation. It might be an informal chat about how your loved one is feeling and how they’d like to continue to live life staying independent. Or you might want to chat about care options so make sure you have this information to hand. It may help to involve other family members and friends, such as siblings and grandchildren, who’ll be involved in their care.
- Listen – it’s important that you take time to really hear your loved ones, be patient with them and encourage them, making clear you have their best interests at heart. Find out how your loved one is managing. Is there anything they are struggling with at home? How do they feel they are coping and is there any support they would like? What would their preferences be? While you might not be able to meet all their wishes, it’s important to take them into consideration.
- How to talk about it – make clear in the conversation that care is about prolonging your loved one’s independence and helping them to stay at home for longer, doing what they enjoy, continuing to live life their way but with some help to make things easier. Explain that addressing care now will help them to stay well at home for longer.
How Home Instead Sutton Coldfield can help?
Our survey findings:
- One in five haven’t had a conversation with their parents about care or later life planning because they don’t know where to begin.
- One in ten are concerned about researching care topics.
We are mindful that many people do not understand how the care system works, and we are therefore well positioned to take them through the journey from not only a care perspective, but also from an educational point of view. We have highlighted below the care journey specifically and how Home Instead can be of great benefit:
- Enquiry – upon the initial enquiry, we aim to discover the “needs” of you or your loved one and identify what level of support Home Instead can offer, in terms of number of calls each week as well as potential timings. Once we have noted the high-level details, we go into more depth regarding care currently received as well as setting out our service benefits and how we can improve outcomes for an individual. This includes having a 1 hour minimum call length in place as we feel it’s important to give our clients the time they deserve, introducing our carers first so that your loved ones will see a familiar face coming to the door and instilling a culture of continuous care so that the people we support know which carers are assigned to them week-in, week-out.
- Consultation – the next step would be to attend a care consultation with you and your loved ones where we run through the documentation and undertake a needs, risk and environmental assessment concurrently. We work with the family to put in place a package of care which is right for the individual, allowing them to stay safe and independent in the comfort of their own home.
- Scheduling – once we know how many calls are required, we allocate Care Professionals to each visit taking into consideration shared values, hobbies and interests. This is very important to us as it allows our carers to build long-lasting meaningful relationships with our clients and they become genuine companions.
Home Instead Sutton Coldfield adapts care packages to suit the changing needs of the client, and it provides us with an opportunity to home in on and deliver the various care services we offer. For example, one of our clients began by receiving two companionship care visits a week, and when they started showing more dementia symptoms, we introduced specialist dementia care and then eventually live-in care as they wished to stay at home rather than move into a care home when their health deteriorated. This is an illustration of how we can tailor a package of care when the need arises, reinforcing our ability to be flexible, agile and react quickly when circumstances change.
