Nursing Homes | In Care of Dad

Archive for the ‘Nursing Homes’ Category

Calculating The Cost Of Care

Posted on November 14th, 2011 by kim

by Kim Keller

Here’s a fabulous resource: The Genworth Cost of Care Survey, which provides the costs for various home care providers, adult day health care centers, assisted-living facilities and nursing homes. The survey notes the lowest, highest and median costs of these services by state (including the District of Columbia), as well as the median annual costs of care by city.

Here are the national median costs for:

Homemaker (Personal Care Assistant or Companion): $18/hour

For someone who lives at home and needs additional household help, such as housecleaning, cooking, running errands, companionship
No personal or medical care provided
Price is based on a non-Medicare, licensed agency
Most agencies require a 4-hour minimum
Genworth notes that the lowest hourly rate is $9 and the highest is $34

55 Comments

My “Impossible” Client

Posted on September 12th, 2011 by kim

by Joan Blumenfeld, MS, LPC

I once had a client — let’s call him Jim, though it’s not his given name — who seemed impossible to handle.

He was verbally abusive and often violent. Though he was an intelligent man who could be witty and charming when so inclined, Jim was also suffering from dementia, diabetes and mobility problems, and these issues seemed to make each day an angry challenge for him.

Conflict wasn’t a new situation for him, though: Jim’s life history was rife with it. He was a full-blown alcoholic until he was finally confined to a hospital detox unit. He had alienated his children so irrevocably that they wanted nothing to do with him. Yet, in spite of his nasty behaviors, he somehow managed to keep many of us invested in him.

16 Comments

Residents Are People Too!

Posted on July 4th, 2011 by karen

by Joan Blumenfeld, MS, LPC

My client was a woman of many parts. Over the course of her lifetime, Edith had been an artist, a speech pathologist, a teacher, a counselor, a wife, mother, grandmother — even an astronaut! She had trained with NASA to be among the first civilians to go up in a rocket, but those hopes were dashed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1983.

My client was an also ardent American patriot having emigrated to the United States as a young adult fleeing the spread of Nazism. She had been a beautiful, vibrant, European intellectual of the Bohemian sort.

10 Comments

Reconsider The Nursing Home

Posted on April 12th, 2011 by karen

by Joan Blumenfeld, MS, LPC

When our father was 90 years old, he asked me to promise that I would never put him in a nursing home. My heart sank! I knew nursing homes were anathema to him, but I also knew that I might not be able to keep that promise. So I didn’t make it.

I did promise my father that I would never abandon him and I would always love him. Ultimately, financial and medical pressures forced the issue, just as I suspected might happen, and we had to put both our parents into nursing home care.

9 Comments