When you’re a long-distance family caregiver you can very easily start to feel like you’re in the dark and that you just don’t know what’s happening or what your senior needs. With a little bit of additional help, it’s a lot easier to get the information you need so that you can put the right plans together for your senior.
As Many Details as You Can Gather
The most crucial part of being a family caregiver, whether you’re right there with your senior or far away, is that you’ve got the information that you need to make the right choices. So, as many details as you can gather will help you immensely. You need to know what your senior’s health issues are, what medications she takes, and anything else that will help you to be more helpful to her.
What Your Senior Needs
You also need to understand what your senior’s needs are. Is she having trouble with household chores, errands, or making meals? That’s good to know. If she’s having problems managing some of her health-related tasks, that’s also important to know. When you’ve got a full handle on her needs, you know a lot more about where help needs to step in.
What Other Caregiver Needs Might Help Your Senior
Talk to your elderly family member about what might be helpful to her. Does she need a caregiver on a regular basis? That might answer a variety of issues for your elderly family member. If she needs physical therapy or other medical treatments, you need to know that, too. You’re looking for possible solutions, so it doesn’t have to be a perfect answer right out of the gate.
How to Best Implement Solutions for Your Senior
As a long-distance caregiver, you’re more in a coordinator role for your elderly family member. That doesn’t mean that you’re not still caring for her, it just means that you’re ensuring that all of those moving pieces are fitting together in the best way possible to meet your senior’s needs. Over time, you’ll get better and better at finding the right ways to put plans in motion.
Do what you can to visit your senior as often as possible. That allows you to check in with her on a different level and also make sure that you’re on top of what’s really going on. Frequent visits aren’t always a possibility, which is another reason that having a caregiver in place offering hands-on help can be so important.