What is a Care Coordinator?

A Care Coordinator is a health care professional who works for law firm. Our Care Coordinators have college degrees in health care or social work. Care Coordinators are usually licensed as Registered Nurses or Licensed Clinical Social Workers. They usually have extensive experience working with the disabled in various capacities or with the frail elderly in nursing homes, assisted living facilities or hospitals.

What Does a Care Coordinator Do?

Care Coordinators provide services to frail elders and the disabled, their family members or adjunct professions that produce a variety of benefits, add value and increase the client’s quality of life. Our Care Coordinators are members of the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers and act within its standards of practice, ethics, and licensure review.

Care Coordinators can:

• Provide crises intervention
• Reduce the stress and insecurity of ongoing assistance for long-distance family members
• Access the appropriateness of current living arrangement and care services being provided and determine whether improvements can be made within parameters provided by the client
• Assist with residency decisions
• Assist with selection of caregiver, adult day care, durable medical  equipment and disability contractor services
• Provide advocacy services when the proper care is not being provided
• Provide coordination of care to reduce miscommunication, time, stress, errors, and cost to clients
• Improve efficiency and flexibility through use of a streamlined and client-centered process (as opposed to relying on the health care system bureaucracy)
• Provide cost control by reducing inappropriate institutional care and overuse of services as well as proactive monitoring to prevent costly crises and unnecessary hospitalization

When Are Care Coordination Services Needed?

Often situations arise which signal that changes may be needed in an elderly or disabled person’s living situation or that a crisis is imminent.

Crises

• Frequent emergency room visits for falls, accidents, or other health events
• Reports from police, emergency medical teams, neighbors, or social services about elders
• Recent loss of spouse
• Depression or suicidal thinking related by elder living alone
• Elder behavior issues reported in assisted living facility or nursing home

Deteriorating Conditions

• Single elders are experiencing greater isolation and less stimulation from family, friends, neighbors and social activities
• Elders are less able to care for themselves during the activities of daily living; elder is unsafe being left alone
• Children experience increasing stress about a parent’s health condition
• Elders begin experiencing delusions, hallucinations or a distorted sense of reality
• Elders or family are frustrated with the care provided or status of an elder’s condition at an assisted living facility or nursing home
• Elders or family are dissatisfied with the quality of a caregiver or in-home aid’s services or attitude to elders
• Elders are unhappy with the services being provided by health care professionals or in-home caregivers or believe they are insufficient or inappropriate
• Children are increasingly concerned about an elder’s physical or mental abilities
• Pain is becoming an important issue with an elder’s quality of life
• Elders or family are concerned about security or accessibility of an elder’s living environment.

Life Transitions

• Elder wants to transition to a retirement community
• Discharge arrangements need to be made for an elder from a health care facility
• Elder couple wants to live independently at home despite disabilities
• Family considering having an elder live with one of the children
• Family coming to grips with the grief, dying, and death process
• A family caretaker needs to transition responsibility to another party
• An elder needs a conservator of the estate or person

Long-Term Planning

• Medicare benefits are running out for elder in a health care facility
• Elders need help allocating resources to their family and planning to optimize long term care costs and tax burdens
• Elders need help with end of estate plans, advance health care directives or durable powers of attorney
• Elders interested in purchasing long term care insurance but don’t have knowledge of costs and benefits
• Elders and family need a strategy for managing life transitions

Long-Distance Caregiving

• Medicare benefits are running out for elder in a health care facility
• Elders need help allocating resources to their family and planning to optimize long term care costs and tax burdens
• Elders need help with end of life plans and advance health care directives
• Elders interested in purchasing long term care insurance but don’t have knowledge of costs and benefits
• Family wants to move elder to their state but need knowledge of local services
• Elders and family need a strategy for managing life transitions