How to Assess Your Loved One’s Medical Needs

A good baseline in assessing your loved one’s health and medical needs is to review their abilities to perform activities of daily living. This is a standard you see when it comes to long-term care assistance, but it’s also a good diagnostic tool.

Do they need help with eating, bathing, dressing or going to the bathroom? Do they need help being transferred from their bed to a chair? Based on your review of those activities, questions may arise about the need for in-home help. Dependent upon your situation, options could include:

A visiting nurse.
Outside helpers like “Seniors Helping Seniors” or other organizations.
An in-home health aide: A family member, friend or someone that the family hires.

All of this can be coordinated by an Elder Care or Geriatric Care Specialist, who is someone who manages these issues (and more) for your family.

Inevitably, as you start to look at this, one issue that comes up is insurance. You want to know what’s available to defray the cost of care giving. So, do a review of which insurance policies your care recipient currently holds. There are many things to take into account, such as:

Health insurance.
Medicare.
Life insurance.
Long-term care insurance.

For all the policies, request enforced illustrations to confirm the premiums, the death benefits, the loans and the cash values. Long-term care insurance will certainty pop up, and you may need to pay special attention to that as you review your care recipient’s long-term care funding options.

Long-term care is defined as “needing assistance to handle some of the basic activities of daily living or requiring substantial supervision due to impairment.” We reviewed before what the daily activities are, and you need to decide what will happen when the care recipient is unable to handle some of those activities.

Is there a long-term care insurance? Or a life insurance with a long-term care rider? You’ll want to look at this, weight all of the options and seek professional advice for choosing what suits the care recipient’s needs best.