Health Care - Are You Ready?
A Handbook for Care Givers
by
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Are you ready to provide health care? Are you prepared to meet the duties, responsibilities and expectations of a care giver? We are moving toward more home health care, yet most people are inexperienced at care giving. It is a role that can be rewarding, exciting and even spiritual. If not managed properly, it can also be depressing, exhausting, filled with anxiety and frustration, even opening oneself to illness. Care givers are not only responsible for themselves, but also children, work, maintaining a living environment, etc., all of which increase the demands on them. By reading about care giving and preparing for the role, you can avoid, or at least mitigate the potentially negative aspects and enhance the positive attributes of the role.
Health care consists of care givers and care receivers, and it is likely that you will be in one or both roles sometime during your life. Some care givers are thrust into their role because a child, spouse, or parent becomes sick. Others are drawn into it through the relationship they have with the care receiver. How care givers get involved or where they get involved in the process of giving care is less important than knowing how to be supportive without suffering a devastating toll.
There are four types of care givers:
1. The Professional – someone, typically in the medical profession, who is professionally trained to provide support. This category can include medical doctors, nurses, hospital technicians, pharmacists, psychologists, and social workers.
2. Spiritual Advisor/Leader – someone who provides the spiritual guidance that is important to the overall health needs of the care receiver. In the traditional form, spiritual care givers are ministers, priests, rabbis or imams. Lay ministry, Stephen Ministry, family and friends often supplement professional spiritual care givers
3. “Lay” Medical Care Giver – someone trained in supporting the care receiver with very specific tasks such as giving injections, regulating oxygen, administering prescriptions, etc.
4. “Relief Pitcher” – someone who may help by doing chores such as cleaning the house, running errands, providing meals or friendly conversation.
Care givers in all four groups focus on the needs and wellbeing of the care receiver. Your care-giving role may fit nicely into one of the four described here or it may be a combination of the different roles. In all these roles, care giving can be both invaluable to the care receiver and a good experience for the care giver.
Care givers can help reduce the effort and stress of care giving and ease the burdens of the care receiver by being prepared to assist with the management of paperwork required by insurance companies and the professional medical community, by working in partnership with the medical professionals, and by encouraging good communication with all interested parties.
Completing insurance forms and validating medical charges can be tedious enough to make the healthy sick. The complexity of the insurance industry is compounded by programs at the Federal and State level. Medical payments are further complicated by billing codes, procedure codes, the breakdown of surgery or a procedure into multiple codes (for example, the surgeon, the attending physician, the anesthetist, the radiologist, the technicians and so on), not to mention the medications. Insurance claims must be correlated with the information coming from the medical community--the medical tests and results, billing statements, and equipment rentals, etc. Just managing all of the medical information can be overwhelming, particularly for those who are ill, elderly, or unprepared.
Helpful care giving is important whether a person has been ill, suffers a recurring illness such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), has recurring cancer or is on dialysis. It will take some time to learn what you can do to be helpful. Unless you are the person legally responsible for the individual or are a professional care giver, learning about the details of the illness, medications and related information may be difficult because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule that protects the privacy of the care receiver.
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About the Book
Are You Ready?
“The move to provide care in homes will increase indefinitely requiring both new professionals and increased education to the public so they are ready to work with health care systems to provide the care their family needs in their own homes.” Joseph Flaherty, MD, Dean of the
Who will be caring for you, your parents, your children, your extended family or your friends? How will changes in the health care system impact you?
Here you will find tools and templates to help you build relationships with primary suppliers of professional medical care and insurance and legal assistance. These provisions will help you to manage the entire health care process.
Approaches beyond traditional medical protocols are included as possible supplements to improve the health of the patient and to assist with the health of the care giver.
This book is a valuable resource for anyone who finds themselves in the role of primary caregiver of a loved one. As that caregiver, you want to know you are doing everything possible. The information presented here will assist with that endeavor in an organized and deliberate approach.” Terri Fields, Lay Care Giver
“A must read for all involved in health care, including patients, home care providers and the doctors themselves. The book reinforces many of the issues involved in health care that are critical in assisting the overall wellbeing of the patient.” Reed Panos, MD, Medical Director of Surgical Services at the Carle Clinic Association and Chief of the Department of Surgery, Carle Foundation Hospital
“After 30 years of providing pastoral care for individuals in need, I have come to treasure most those family members and friends who are there when no ‘professional’ is in sight. You who know your patient’s deepest spiritual needs, this resource comes from someone who has been there.” Roger Digges, Senior Pastor
About the Author
My involvement in health care began in the 1950’s when I observed my great grandmother receiving care in the home of her daughter. Many years later, just after graduating from high school, I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. Through numerous hospital stays, diets, medication, tests and treatments I finally had to have surgery. I experienced the receiving end of the professional and lay care giving roles and the relationships that were forged to help with my recovery.
As a care giver I have had the experiences all parents do with caring for children or a spouse with the flu, colds, are related maladies. Additionally, I have had substantial roles in the health care of my sister, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 20 and subsequently died at age 39. The second experience was serving as the primary “lay” care giver to my wife, who was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer at the age of 43. We worked together, with her taking the lead most of the way, from a stem cell transplant, to chemotherapy and radiation, to surgery, and ultimately hospice care. My wife died at the age of 49.