Sunday, April 28, 2013

Aging Parents: Mother’s Day 2013-Gifts To Use Up–thoughtful/delicious/exciting/pampering/practical 2013

"I don' want anything that takes up space or I have to dust.
I just want my children to be together and get along."
74-year-old grandmother


Please go to my other site to view entire post and pictures.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

19 Free Services for Seniors and Caregivers to Help Parents Age Well

There’s an old saying: “you get what you pay for.” This old adage may be impossible to “buy into” in these economic times. Many are out of work or underemployed. Others are living on fixed incomes that provide interest rates barely above 0%. So it may pay to know about the free programs available.

Please visit my other site to view the rest of this post.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Wise Words: 9 Pearls of Wisdom From our 99-year-old Sr. Advisor

                                    R’s 9 Original Sayings:
                               Words of Wisdom About Life

Original sayings must be in Sr. Advisor R’s DNA. One of her mother’s sayings, “Do the best you can, angels can do no more,” has appeared in previous posts. Wisdom…based on many year’s of living. R’s mother died in her early 90′s. R will be 100 in September. 


Please go to my other site to view entire post.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Help Aging Parents: Avoiding the Accidental "Bad Things"

"EACH YEAR, half-a-million injuries occur in the United States because of medication errors," according to a 2009 U Magazine (UCLA health) article.

We live in an imperfect world. The older we get the more we're aware. With a better understanding of "best practices" are we better equipped to help hospitalized aging parents avoid accidental bad things because we know what to look for and thus, know what questions to ask? How can we know and ask pertinent questions if we're clueless about it in the first place?

The following excerpted information from U Magazine's 2009 article, "Do No Harm," illuminates measures the UCLA hospital system began implementing to reduce the potential for accidental "bad things" (my words for the overarching concept). Having this knowledge helps us know what to look for. Hopefully our hospitals have implemented some of these measures so we and our aging parents can take advantage--now 4 years later.









Please visit my other site to view entire post.





 

Monday, April 8, 2013

Help Aging Parents, Grandparents, And Loved-Ones: Can Care-giving Family Members Do It All?

The New Old Age column from a 10/16/12 NY Times recently surfaced. Its subject: family caregivers and the fact that they do many nursing tasks formerly assigned to professionals.

Speaking of “nursing tasks,” the Visiting Nurse Service of New York ran some–I think–wonderful full-page ads. For example, a photo of a nice-looking, elderly gentleman with kind eyes and white hair. The ad reads:

He’s 95, Takes 10 medications, Needs help bathing, walking and dressing,
And feels deeply grateful.

He’s “grateful to the physician who helped him get all the care he needs to stay out of a nursing home, with Medicaid Managed Long Term Care (MLTC) from VNSNY.” This is followed by text enumerating the Medicaid-covered home care and long-term care services, basically nurse care management and home health aide services.

Back to the New Old Age column. It enumerates the tasks family members now do (eg. give injections, manage feeding tubes, manage complicated medications), with “little training and no backup.”


Visit my other site to view the entire post

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Memory Gains (not Losses) in New Study--average age 84: Help for Aging Parents, Grandparents and Eventually Us

Heartening research: News comes from a small study--indeed one of the first--to assess the effects a computerized-memory training program has on memory. Published in UCLA's Summer 2013 U Magazine, courtesy UCLA Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine.....

Please visit my other site to view entire post.