At ElderHonor, we approach caregiving by providing education, the latest tools, methodologies, and news to keep you up-to-date on the medical, technology and care processes. Our model called C.A.R.E helps focus this approach and makes it easier to think about caregiving.
Conversations – Assessments – Roadmap – Education
Conversations
We start out model with Conversations. Every day you have conversations with spouses, children, parents (hopefully!), colleagues and many others. Whether you are just starting out or are in the middle or end of providing care, conversations are important as they guide you through making informed decisions. One of our goals is that you make informed and confident decisions and that occurs by having conversations. Knowing what to ask, where to go for more information and when to follow up happens through conversations with many people with varied backgrounds. We provide you conversation starters with your parents in the course along with checklists and plans to guide you through your caregiving journey.
Assessments
Once the conversation is going it is generally easier to assess the situation. Your assessments should naturally begin with overall health and abilities but include financial, legal, home, and much more. The more you know about the situation the better you can make informed decisions. You do this already within your own family in a much more casual way. Think about it, you assess your cash flow to see if you can buy that new house, car, pair of shoes, gadgets, etc.. You are also assessing physical abilities; can I walk that far, climb that hill, ride that bike? What kind of mental abilities do I have? Doing math in your head, read any type of journal, even play a challenging game with friends. Assessing your parent’s abilities is similar and helps them see what they can and cannot do. Our Caregiving-Getting Started course provides 20+ assessments for you to use. There is also the Complete Caregiving Toolkit that takes you through the entire process of journey of taking care of your parents. You can find that course here.
Roadmap
Once you know the situation through assessments, you can build out a roadmap. Who does what, when, how often? What are the next steps? Do you move or age-in-place? Knowing what to do as well as what is coming next helps reduce the stress, anxiety, doubt, and guilt that come with just letting things happen to you or your loved one. Our course provides you with a Roadmap to help you along in making those decisions confidently.
Education
If you haven’t caught on yet, we are big in educating you as much as possible to help you on this journey. Our course is the main way to get you started and it continues with Links and News to keep you up-to-date on the latest information. Informed decision making is our goal, helping you know what to do and what to expect, reducing your time searching for information so that you can focus on who you need to be with and by in the end. Hopefully, we can even bring a smile to your face.
That’s our model. It’s an easy-to-use acronym to help us stay focused while providing you with tools, tactics, and motivation through this time of life. We hope you like and engage with us and our course offerings.