WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Why choose home care rather than care at a
nursing facility?
Where in your home?
What will you need?
When will who have to do
what?
Who will you hire?
How will you manage the
care?
OUR PROMISE
You will learn from our
experience
how to prepare for the homecoming of your patient and how to manage nursing
care at home thereafter.
YOUR OPPORTUNITY AND
RESPONSIBILITY
Providing skilled
nursing care at home is both challenging and rewarding for the caregivers. Home
care is a blessing for the patient. Having chosen to provide it, you
deserve to congratulate yourself. To make this project more manageable, take
advantage of the advice and the forms provided here.
HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL
Someone you care deeply
about is being released from the hospital, with the alternatives of home care,
hospice care, or a nursing home. You have to decide, or help them decide, which
alternative is best. If you decide on home care, you may need to manage it.
This book will help you understand how to provide skilled nursing care at home
and will aid in your decision-making.
As noted, the
co-authors have been involved for over a decade in supplying and managing
skilled nursing care at home for Tina Su Cooper (Cooper, 2011):
In June of 2004, when
she came home from the Critical Care Unit after the 100 days that nearly killed
her, Tina was on a ventilator, quadriplegic, fed through a gastric tube. Not
only was she totally dependent on us for her care, the list of infections and
problems that had developed while hospitalized was daunting. She had been
“colonized” by two strains of hospital-acquired bacteria and given only months
to live. She was safer at home or in a hospice than in the hospital, our
doctors agreed. Being given the choice
of home or the hospice meant there was a good chance she had only months to
live. She took it in stride.
Over a decade later,
Tina’s health has remained strong, and even though the losses caused by multiple
sclerosis have been severe, including quadriplegia, dependence on a ventilator
and the need to be fed and medicated by a gastric tube, she has been able to
live an added twelve years and generally enjoy her life at home.
We, the co-authors,
have long thought it worthwhile to write a book about our experience, but only
recently got down to doing it. Investigating what was available at mega-bookseller
amazon.com, we found only one relevant entry when we queried
“manage nursing care at home.” That book, How to Manage Family Illness at
Home, which we will describe next, was written by a British author, Gill
Pharaoh, published in paperback in 2004, re-issued as a Kindle e-book in 2015.
The chapter list for
Ms. Pharaoh’s book is as follows:
Chapter 1: Receiving the Diagnosis
Chapter 2: Whom to Tell?
Chapter 3: The Services of the Hospice and Palliative Care Team
Chapter 4: Making Decisions about Work
Chapter 5: How Much to Tell the Children?
Chapter 6: Caring for the Carer
Chapter 7: Looking at Ways in Which Everyone Can Help
Chapter 8: The Physical Needs of the Person Who is Ill*
Chapter 9: The Use of Aids and Appliances*
Chapter 10: Some Common Symptoms and the Use of Medication
Chapter 11: Physical Comfort, Health, and Safety for Everyone
Involved
Chapter 12: Children: Managing Change and Planning for the
Future
Chapter 13: Long-term Care: Unhappy Families and Mental Health
Chapter 14: Acknowledging Anger
Chapter 15: Dealing with Depression
Chapter 16: The Question of Euthanasia
Chapter 17: Dying at Home
Chapter 18: Dying in the Hospital
Chapter 19: The Effects of Bereavement
Chapter 20: Supporting a Friend
Chapter 21: Starting a New Life Alone
Ms. Pharaoh’s valuable
book emphasizes the many significant psycho-social aspects of home care, and
hospice care at home, two areas we are not going to explore in depth. Her two chapters that
we have marked with asterisks cover topics similar to what is covered here,
where we go into the “nuts and bolts” of managing nursing care for someone at
home.
A less restrictive search, for ebooks
covering “nursing care at home,” gave the following titles:
·
Long Term Care: Everything You Need to Know about Long Term
Care Nursing and How to Plan and Pay for Long Term Care and Insurance [2014]
·
Nursing Wild Birds for Release at Home: Booklet [2014]
·
Now and at the Hour of Our Death [2015]
·
American Cancer Society Complete Guide to Family
Caregiving: The Essential Guide to Cancer Caregiving at Home [2012]
·
Keeping Your Mind While They’re Losing Theirs: A Sometimes
Poignant Look at Dealing with a Parent who Has Alzheimer’s or Dementia [2015]
·
Five Ways to Pay for Home Healthcare and Stay in Your Home
[2012]
·
AIDS Care at Home: A Guide for Caregivers, Loved Ones, and
People with a AIDS [1994]
·
Elder Care Activities: 105 Great Activities You Can Do at
Home, in Assisted Living, a Retirement Community, or in a Nursing Home [2013]
·
Perspectives on Care at Home for Older People [2013]
·
Conscious Acts of Grace --- Gifts of Love and Kindness at
the End of Life [2010]
·
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of
Death [2013]
·
The Preemie Parents’ Companion: The Essential Guide to
Caring for Your Premature Baby in the Hospital, at Home, and Through the First
Years [2000]
·
Spiritual Midwifery [2002]
·
Keeley Meditation: Free Your Mind [2012]
·
The Complete Guide to Medicaid Nursing Home Costs: How to
Keep Your Family Assets Protected – up to date Medicaid… [2008]
·
Comrades in Health: US. Health Internationalists, Abroad
and at Home [2013]
·
Caregiver Relief: A Stress Management Guide [2013]
·
Seniors at Large [2012]
·
Cancer Caregiving A-to-Z: An At-home Guide for Patients and
Families [2008]
·
Conversations at the Nursing Home: A Mother, a Daughter,
and Alzheimer’s [2013]
·
Massachusetts General Hospital Handbook of General Hospital
Psychiatry [2010]
·
Angels at the Door [2014]
·
Caregiving Tips A-Z [2008]
·
Making Myself at Home in a Nursing Home [2012]
·
Supporting People with Dementia at Home: Challenges and
Opportunities for the 21st Century [2012]
·
Jekel’s Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Preventive Medicine
[2013]
·
A New Look at Community-Based Respite Programs:
Utilization, Satisfaction, and Development [2014]
·
Waiting at the Gate: Creativity and Hope in the Nursing
Home [2014]
·
How to Find Someone to Care for Your Aging Person at Home
[2010]
·
Providing Good Care at Night for Older People: Practical
Approaches for Use in Nursing and Care Homes [2011]
Some of these books would be logical sources
for more detailed information on topics that will be just touched on here. There were 40 results
for the Amazon Kindle ebooks. Expanding the search to all books on amazon.com
with the same “nursing care at home” topic gave 291 items. You will not suffer
from a shortage of reading matter, if you wish.
From the 40 titles listed above, we can make
some distinctions about what our book does and does not cover: we cover nursing
care for the chronically ill at home, including the elderly, but
· not premature babies,
· not end-of-life,
hospice care,
· not respite care for
caregivers, and…unsurprisingly…
· not nursing wild
birds.
Those who want to explore topics not covered
here are directed to some of the titles listed above, or the titles that come
from a search that includes both printed and ebooks.
Subsequently, we became aware of an exceptionally complete
treatise on home care, Tena L. Scallan’s excellent The Ultimate Compassionate
Guide to Caregiving: A Simple Blueprint for Dealing with Today’s Healthcare
Crisis Combined with Years of Wisdom and Sound Advice, published in 2015
and available in paperback and ebook formats from Amazon, a book which gives
finely detailed advice on the non-medical care of patients in the home, advice
which we summarize in our appendix, “Custodial Care at Home,” a book we urge
our readers to obtain to supplement our own, which has more of a medical
management emphasis. Similarly, in 2015 was published The Successful Caregiver’s Guide, by Rick Lauber (2015),
particularly valuable for those who must move their loved ones to a care
facility.
We have organized the first part of our
book along the lines of the traditional questions a journalist would ask,
though in a somewhat different order: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
We will start with why. As Stephen R. Covey advised in his The 7
Habits of Highly Effective People, one should “start with the end in mind.”
Contact information:
Diane R. Beggin, RN
40 Sycamore Drive
Montgomery, NY 12549
http://managenursingcareathome.com
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