Medicare Partners With Kinship Caregivers To Find Alternatives To Nursing Home Care With Respite Care

Putting your loved one into a nursing home is a hard decision to make. Although there are times when you have little choice because of your own health and family obligation, more often than not...

Putting your loved one into a nursing home is a hard decision to make. Although there are times when you have little choice because of your own health and family obligation, more often than not the prospect of putting an elderly parent or other close family member into a home is one that is laced with guilt and almost always causes problems between various family members. To this end it is heartening that Medicare partners with kinship caregivers to find alternatives to nursing home care.

Granted, a lot of this has to do with cutting down on the costs presented to Medicare, but for families who are not enamored with the idea of putting mom or dad into a nursing home in the first place, help is welcomed no matter who offers it or why. Medicare has a number of suggestions available which can make the giving of care easier, more convenient, and a lot less stressful on the kinship caregiver.

1. Relieve mealtime stress with Meals on Wheels programs in your area. Dedicated volunteers deliver nutritious meals to your loved one’s door and quite often provide a bit of extra companionship during the meal.

2. Adult daycare is an out of home service where daycare centers for adults are set up and supervised minimal care is offered. Frequently it is more a facilitation of recreational activities and social interaction and less a warehousing of elderly individuals, but many of the adult daycare centers offer medication services.

3. Kinship caregivers wanting to avoid the nursing home option will be pleasantly surprised to find out that some nursing homes actually offer respite care services in which case the loved one may spend some time at the nursing home, but with the understanding that the caregiver will return within a short period of time to pick her or him up. The advantage of nursing home provided respite care over adult daycare rests in the fact that even the elderly suffering from various medical problems may receive the specialized nursing they require at the facility.

This latter case is of special interest to the kinship caregiver since Medicare and also Medicaid will consider paying a certain percentage toward any care that may be medical in nature. While this most likely will not cover the whole cost of respite care, it does take care of a good chunk of it and this may make the difference in the decision of fulltime nursing care or part time respite care from the local nursing home.

Kinship caregivers and the loved one need to discuss in detail how to handle the care on a day to day basis. Although it is up to the caregiver to decide if she or he is able and willing to perform the care the loved one requires on a daily basis, in families where this option is chosen the reliance on governmentally subsidized programs has been proven to be a wonderful way for the caregiver to meet her or his personal and primary familial obligations in addition to providing the much needed and appreciated care to the elderly individual.

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