Resources
Resources
Caring for Yourself as a Caregiver with Mini-Breaks
Being a caregiver of an older adult with a chronic illness can be especially challenging. Trying to meet both their healthcare and safety needs can often take up most of a caregivers’ time. Letting your loved ones’ care needs overshadow your own, however, can lead to resentment and impatience and can impact your own health. How can caregivers step away from their caregiving role and still ensure supervision and safety? Enter the mini-break, a small bitesize rest period that provides time to step out of the caregiving role without leaving the one you care for to do so.
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How to Handle Advance Directives When a Loved One Has Dementia
Advance directives—legal documents that allow one to express their end-of-life wishes regarding finances and medical care—are important for all of us to consider as we age as a way of retaining decision-making authority no matter what happens to us. However, end-of-life can be a very difficult thing to confront. Even though advance directives are designed to help us protect our wishes and the futures of our loved ones, it's easy to delay making them until a health crisis happens. But what if that health crisis is dementia?
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3 Ways Older Adults Can Stay Healthy In The New Year
As we head more into the new year, this tends to be a time of reflection and improvement for most older adults. While it’s no mystery, improving your health seems to be the most popular area of concentration for everybody. When starting to write your next chapter, being healthy makes it easier for you to do so in the best way possible. Whether you have your goals locked in or you’re still searching for a plan of attack, here are three ways you can stay healthy throughout all of 2023.
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Why Assessment is More Effective When It’s Conducted Over Time
Many people take the term “assessment” to be the first phase of a diagnostic or treatment program. But in the case of a comprehensive, long-term caregiver support program, assessment is actually much more effective when it’s treated as an ongoing process. Through multiple clinical trials conducted with BRI Care Consultation, Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging’s evidence-based care-coaching program, we've learned that it takes time to identify and uncover all the areas of need within a caregiving environment, and that many needs are missed when using a one-and-done assessment model.
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4 Benefits of Reminiscence and Storytelling in Improving Caregiving
As we age, it can sometimes feel as if our lives are defined more by our health and the conditions we may be living with than by our past experiences, values and memories. For those coping with memory loss, it may be even harder to feel a connection to the past and the things that matter most. As caregivers, managing a loved one’s current wellbeing may seem a higher priority than reflecting on the past, but giving a loved one an outlet to reminisce may be more important than we think. Research shows that storytelling has numerous benefits not only for older adults, but also for their caregivers through improved, personalized care and better communication.
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