Transitioning to Long-Term Care
Greg Mundell with Careage at Patriot’s Landing talks about moving to senior living, assisted living, memory care, Alzheimer’s and Dementia.
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*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
This is a special presentation of answers for elders with carriage. Welcome back to the program everyone. I am here with Mr Greg Mandel from carriage. Carriage is a company here in greater puget sound that owns several retirement living skilled care facilities in Bellevue and down by JBLM, joint based Lewis mccord and great specifically comes from Patriots landing and Greig, welcome to the program thank you. You Know Patriots landing. Obviously you are a company that is definitely in Patriots Glen, your other assist a living property. You guys really do a lot to support the veterans, but you have other types of residence, obviously, that are looking to make a transition from living independently to moving into assisted living. There’s a lot of families out there right now that are thinking, okay, we have to make this step. This is I know that June is the busiest month in retirement living. I’ve known that notoriously. You know, families come in when schools out and when summer hits and your it’s time to make that shift. Well, it’s a huge shift and Greg I love that you’re going to hit be talking about how to make that shift easy. So welcome. Well, thank you so greg. Tell me a little bit about you know, what’s your what’s your procedure? When somebody comes from their home and they move into assist a living, what’s the most biggest concerns that families have? Usually the biggest concern is the amount of care that they’re loved one will need or the resident themselves right, because sometimes they’re doing this of their own volition. That’s you’re having more and more are and more now on to they’ve got these plans, they are they’re enacting that plan. So it really starts well before that they come in. Sure we have a director of nursing who, if it looks like they’re going to need assisted living care, will go and assess to make sure that it’s appropriate, that we can actually cater to those needs, MMM, and then to actually fine tune what those needs are. Then they meet with a marketer who gets some of their social information, gets the transition in as far as on paperwork, right, licensure with this state. And then, finally, as a social worker at the at the facility I work, I set up a care plan and then fine tune what the care will be an assist with going for word. That’s transition. Sure. So you know, I love that seniors are getting more involved in the transition, but I also know there’s a lot of families out there that are frustrated because mom or dad may not be all on board and this is kind of being forced on them. It’s a huge emotional change it. You know, I always it’s amazing after about thirty days they’ve adjusted or you know, and usually, but there’s this there’s this period of how do you leave your home that you’ve probably lived in for fifty, sixty years in some cases? I mean we do our answers to elders academies out there and we do a survey just last week. We ask people how many of you live in your home, own home, and of course people raise their hands of they live in their own home. And how many lived there? Ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty. I mean we had people fifty five, sixty five years they’ve been in their house. So you can only imagine that to make that kind of change from home to assisted living. You know, what kind of tips do you have for people that are making that change? You know that the timing of the change is is a big piece for me. A lot of times we’ll see a change, like you said, after ever to get together at the holidays or the summertime, right, but it’s usually following maybe the loss of a spouse house right after an illness, times when they’ve already got their plates full. So something I encourage people to do in the community, people I talked to, is start having these conversations well before that. Amen, don’t wait till that, because it’s already hard on them. Now we’re moving them in and wondering why they’re resistant. Hmmm, you know, it’s it’s always it’s absolutely the truth. It’s it’s about planning the seeds earlier. It’s about honoring them right and and you know, I always say you are doing your parent a disservice by not bringing up the difficult conversations early before they don’t have a chance to be a part of those conversations. Yes, exactly. And and like you know, like what you’re saying is is to start. You know, you’re starting to see seniors take those issues in through their own hands, but not always, not all. You know families. They don’t want to talk about the elephant in the room that you know mom needs help or dad needs help or difference. You know, scenarios like that. So you know ways to bring up the conversation is, of course, mom, I can. I’m concerned about you, you know, and and about that, you know, come from a position of carrying. I’m concerned that you need more help than what you’re able to do in the house. So you of course always have the emergent situation, somebody WHO’s not able to make the decisions for themselves. But as a whole, the people were these conversations should be happening. We talked around them, we talked at them. So these conversations should be including them, respecting their choices, expressing your concerns, of course. Yeah, but the thing that I tell residence who move in or that are questioning keep an open mind. This is a time to reinvent yourself. Sure, this is fantastic. It’s almost like going to a new school or your first day on a new job. You can be whoever. So it’s there the chance to do this reinvent the reinventing himself. Absolutely, and Greg, that is such a huge piece. And, by the way, we are talking to Mr Greg Mandel from carriage and we are talking about how to make that transition into assist a living and as their family members, I was an adult child of my mom and I moved her into assisted living on after she’d been released from a Rehab Facility. So obviously she came that way right. It was hard. It was very hard, and not only for my mom. My mom had to make a move out of her hometown because she had to move near me. So she had a double, she had a double hard and I remember like what could I do to make her time precious? And of course, one of the stupid things I did stupid and now I look back at it, as I decided, I got this big idea that I’m going to go out by my mom all new furniture, which was really stupid because it wasn’t home to her right right. You know, she wanted her old you know, she wanted her bedspread, she wanted her, you know, her her own chair, she wanted the things that made her feel comfortable. So I think one of the things that you know, I’m sure I’d love to talk about with you is, you know, what kind of things can families do to support their parents, besides keeping it as familiar as possible? Really I think what you just you you hit the nail on the head. We have people that think they’re doing the best thing they can. We’re gonna fresh everything, we’re starting over because it’s what they would want. We’re younger, we have time to build these up, sure, but these were their memories, right. So. So something I encourage people to do is keep it as familiar as possible. We’re changing their whole life. So if we can keep their apartment that they’re moving into familiar, gosh, it’s gonna help with that transition. Yeah, so much, so much more. It’s going to make it more smooth and the beauty of assisted living is is that your senior loved ones will have their own apartment. It’s not like you’re having to share room, like you’re giving of a vision of a nursing facility. Assisted living is really you have the ability to live on your own with just a little bit of assistance. Maybe you need assistance with bathing, you’re dressing, you know, your parent might need a little bit of assistance with medications and making sure that those are, you know, monitored correctly and that they don’t double take a pill or forget a pill or something like that. So it gives your parent inability to really live as independently as possible with a lot of support, and that’s the beauty of it. And the other great thing about assisted living, which I love about is the social side. If your parent has mobility issues, if they have here, you know, any sort of issues that they’re living alone, a lot of times they get depressed, they isolate and pretty much their only, you know, company is a TV set and that’s not where you want to go with your loved one because it can contribute to dementia, Alzheimer’s, things like that that, you know, the escalation of those types of things. So assisted living is a wonderful, wonderful tool if you you know, if you find it’s a good fit for your parent to keep them active. Well, and you say a good fit. There are so many avenues, so many activities, different facilities offered different activities. But I have people that come to me and say I don’t like people, I don’t want to be around people, and Adam I do, and that is fine. And there are people that prefer time to themselves, but I start to see them work their way in and they may be with a small quiet group that they spend time with but you know, those are a few more people than they had been around. Yeah, and it’s really neat to see and and obviously, you know, you encouraged people to come and visit before they’d even move in and have lunch or things like that. You know, I would even say a lot of facilities will, and where I work will encourage a meal. But ask to join in with an activity. Look at that. It’s a great idea. Do a schedule tour, that’s great, but do an activity because you’re going to see that the real atmosphere. HMM, and I think that’s just something. And try several and try different times if you’re well ahead of time, come a different times of the year. Sure, and I know to a lot of facilities. I don’t know if you guys do it, but sometimes there’s an opportunity to do what’s called respite care where you could actually go live for, you know, a week or two weeks after, you know, maybe your parents had surgery or they’ve had a bad fall or something like that. So you can just kind of get a taste of what it’s like. And we do. We offer a respite care at Patriots landing. We do also a lot of facilities. Will they’ll provide a temporary stay room. So it’s a trial room. Yes, so you’re not even there on services, even respite care. I love you are there on your own terms and you’re getting to be just involving yourself at your own rate to see. Is this for me? Yeah, I think that’s great. And and you know that’s that works both ways, because obviously you want your your residence to all fit together right and if there isn’t a fit, nobody’s happy. And and and that includes the family. So having that ability to make choices is so incredibly huge. Yes, and I would I would say, with that being said, don’t make too many choices for your family or as a family, for your loved one. I see that frequently. We’re helpful, we’re so helpful that then we’re so overly involved that we take it all we take and they don’t get involved with their new face. Well, it’s interesting. I got when I put my mom and assisted living. I felt like I had to go every day. I they told me, go home, put your feed up. You’ve done enough of your own. And you know I it was hard, but they told me that. So, Greg, how do we reach you? You can reach me at Patriots landing at two hundred and fifty three, nine hundred and six four nine zero zero, just as for Greg Mondel Great Hey, Greig, thanks so much for being on the program thank you. This has been a special presentation of answers for elders with carriage. For more information for carriage, go to CARRIAGECOM. That’s SAR agecom.
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Originally published July 08, 2017