Why your criteria for senior care should extend beyond the basics

When choosing a senior caregiver, training, empathy, and affordability are essential. But families seeking the best support for loved ones also need to look at deeper capabilities. Often, seemingly little things make the biggest differences when it comes to ensuring quality of life, as well as quality of care. 

That’s where patient advocacy comes into play.

Patient advocacy is the process through which a caregiver constantly listens to patients and their families, always seeking to identify and understand areas where care and treatment regimens might have fallen short of goals in the past. It means helping everyone to understand diagnoses and treatments, advising on how to ask the right questions of healthcare providers, seeking ways to overcome barriers ranging from nutrition to transportation, and recognizing changing conditions that suggest a needed medical intervention.

That said, it’s important to recognize and understand what patient advocacy should never become. Caregivers are not gatekeepers. They should not speak directly to doctors, usurp medical authority, or separate families from their loved ones except to protect a patient’s safety. In short, patient advocates use their expertise, experience, and empathy to find ways to enable the senior in their care to retain as much agency and dignity as possible – all while making elder care work as positively and smoothly for everyone involved. 

Here’s how this process works for our Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) at Perfect Care Nursing. These examples are by no means inclusive, but they illustrate how a properly trained patient advocate can make powerful difference:

• Rachel goes to the doctor, who diagnoses a urinary tract infection. She returns home with care instructions that she thought she understood but now finds confusing. Her CNA helps clarify what Rachel needs to do and when – and she helps either Rachel or her daughter to call the healthcare provider’s office with the right questions to ask to better understand the prescribed treatment.
• Harold receives an updated diagnosis that seems at odds with his or his family’s expectations. The CNA listens to both Harold and his family, making sure that everyone has the opportunity to be heard in a civil, respectful manner, until care concerns are met and resolved
• Linda takes multiple medications and suddenly begins experiencing new conditions or side effects but doesn’t know how to articulate what’s happening in a manner that the doctor easily understands. Her CNA patiently asks her questions whose answers provide the vocabulary Linda needs to communicate these essential changes with her physician.
• Arnold can’t or doesn’t want to follow a treatment regimen recommended by his allergist. The CNA takes the time to talk with him and his family and discovers that the recommended regimen of injections is triggering a bad memory from his past. She identifies an alternative approach that might also be successful, which empowers Arnold to discuss this approach with his provider.   
• Jane has trouble reaching rehabilitation appointments because she’s no longer comfortable driving. She trusts her CNA and confides her embarrassment at her condition. The CNA then helps arrange transportation to physical therapy.

In all these scenarios, the caregivers’ commitment to patient advocacy enables the best possible healthcare results as well as the best possible experience for the seniors in their care. Which brings up an essential question: How does anyone find a qualified, experienced, and empathetic caregiver who knows how to act as a patient advocate?

The answer is twofold. First, seek a CNA agency that recognizes the value that comes from high quality care linked to long-term relationships. The more time that patient and caregiver spend together, the deeper the bond and the trust becomes. And that trust helps surface those myriad little details that help the CNA anticipate and respond to minor incidents before they become major crises.

Second, make sure you are seeking the right kind of caregiver. While it may seem attractive to look for a registered nurse over a CNA, many CNAs train specifically to serve as advocates as well as caregivers. Other nursing providers focus more on clinical treatment or general-purpose nursing.

Caregivers who act as responsible care advocates take extra steps to learn about their patients’ intellectual and emotional capabilities as well as their medical conditions. Likewise, they take the time to get to know the family, helping integrate care into positive relationships over extended periods of time. Together, these capabilities provide the support that aging family members need to thrive as well as they possibly can.