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. Read more
How Caregivers Can Help Older Adults Retain Independence Lack or loss of control can be a very frustrating feeling, and it’s one most people have to contend with as they age. A natural reaction to loss of control is resistance. However, for those of us who are caregivers, that resistance can make providing the support a loved one needs challenging. It can feel like having to do daily battle against a loved one’s stubbornness, and as frustration mounts, it can become easy to forget just how much personal freedoms mean to a loved one and how hard it would be for anyone—including us—to give them up. Read more
Communication Aids to Support People with Dementia and IDD One of the biggest challenges facing caregivers and loved ones of someone with moderate to severe dementia and/or intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) is communication. Both conditions can affect a person’s ability to understand what is being said and to respond in a clear, appropriate and easy-to-understand way. Because communication can become so challenging, many caregivers and loved ones make the mistake of getting visibly frustrated, avoiding communication as much as possible and even speaking as if the person with dementia and IDD isn’t in the room and by nature can’t understand anything being said. Read more
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. Read more
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? Read more
Useful Items to Have in the Home When Caring for a Loved One with Dementia “Dementia products” are intended to make life easier for a person with dementia and their loved ones. Some of these products can indeed be helpful. However, often they go unused or hold interest only briefly. Before you jump in and try or buy something, do a little advance thinking about what your loved one's needs are, and what useful items you may already have in your home. Read more
Preventing Caregiver Burnout: Creating Your Self-Care Plan It is essential to understand how stress leads to compassion fatigue and possibly burnout, and that health and well-being through self-care is a vital solution. In this webinar, Courage to Caregivers reviews the components of stress and self-care: (1) what exactly is self-care, (2) what is well-being, (3) understanding stress and its effects; (4) how to plan, prioritize and make time for self-care, and (5) busting the myth that self-care is selfish. Read more
Helping an Older Loved One Maintain Good Oral Health When caring for an older loved one with a chronic health condition or serious health concern, you most likely take them to regular appointments with doctors or specialists to assure that they are healthy and in the best possible condition. But with all these important appointments to manage, do you remember to bring your loved one in for a biannual appointment with their dentist? Though oral health may seem like a smaller concern compared to taking care of a loved one’s chronic health condition or other health issues, a healthy mouth can play an important role in their overall wellbeing, self-image and nutrition. Read more
Busting 4 of the Common Myths About Dementia Though around 6 million individuals in the United States have a diagnosis of dementia, there are still many things that are not fully understood about the causes of the disease and how it can be better treated or even prevented entirely. There are also things about dementia that are commonly misunderstood. Stereotypes and broad generalizations about the disease can easily spread and become “fact” in the minds of the general public, ignoring the fact that dementia represents many different diagnoses and experiences, and cannot always be summed up in simple terms. Read more
End-of-Life Decisions for Individuals with IDD and Dementia This webinar, led by the Hospice of the Western Reserve, assists caregivers in identifying the value of and barriers to recognizing end-of-life in older adults and individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) and dementia. It also emphasizes the importance of Advanced Care Planning for caregivers, and provides tips for healthcare professionals to aid in end-of-life discussions. Read more
