Home Care Sometimes Means Mourning

Support For Home provides in-home care for our clients and emotional and respite support for their families.  In fact, our clients and their families are really part of our own extended family.

There is very little that can surpass the emotional gratification of being successful in extending our clients' ability to live at home, safely and with good quality of life. 

When, as occasionally happens, a client moves to another area or needs to move to a skilled nursing facility, we are saddened, but we understand such choices are sometimes the right answer (see our recent blog on making such decisions).

However, when a client passes away, the pain is intense and the mourning is very real.  Losing a member of our extended family isn't just a phrase, it's very personal.  We run a professional operation, exercise professional judgment and so forth, but we are with our client sometimes every day of the week.  The connection is not simply a business relationship.  It's a personal bond.

Do we continue to provide in-home care, in spite of losing extended family members, on occasion?  Of course we do.  The rewards are immediate and the memories are forever.  Seeing the smile on a man's face, on his 87th birthday, because we took him some of his favorite custard tarts, is worth every bit of worry -- and potential eventual pain -- associated with developing that emotional bond.

So, to our clients and to their families, thank you for being part of our lives and letting us be part of your extended families.  Bert and Siew Pheng

Is Home Still the Right Place?

At Support For Home, our mission is to help people live at home just as long as they want to and safely can. We, along with the courts and gerontologists, believe that home is normally the place where quality of life is the highest. However, we believe that every individual and every family should, in advance, determine the criteria which establishes home as a viable living space.

In this blog and future ones, we will talk about what we consider some of those criteria. There are very few solid lines ("if I'm on this side of the line, all is OK; on that side, I need assisted living or ..."). However, there are a number of factors we feel individuals and their families need to bake into a fairly formal plan.

Many of us have or are developing living wills or Advance Health Care Directives (AHCDs) -- whatever we may call them. These AHCDs specify when we want treatment and when we don't, to prolong life, for example. They don't usually cover, however, the decisions about where we should live, under what circumstances.

What we're talking about, then, is a sort of "Advance Living Directive" -- under these circumstances, I should / must be allowed to live at home; under other circumstances, I should / must be placed in (a) assisted living or in (b) a skilled nursing facility. Identifying the "circumstances" as clearly and precisely as possible is the key to making sure the right decisions will be made (by me, a trustee, or the courts), when the time comes.

What we want to do is to eliminate as much "gray area" or "overlap" of conditions as possible, to reduce ambiguity or confusion for whomever is making the actual decision about where we live. The cleaner the lines, the happier we are all going to be -- and that includes our families.

What are the factors that need to be considered in making that Advance Living Directive real?  Some are obvious -- state of health, finances, etc.  Others are less so.  We'll talk about these more in future blogs.

Please give us feedback.  This is not about our ideas -- it's about solutions.  Help us share those.  Thanks.  Bert and Siew Pheng, Support For Home