Time-out or burnout: Assisted living, other facilities can ease caregiver stress

It’s out there, it’s inevitable, and it’s called “old age.”

While it can be a time of enjoying life after years of career hurdles and childrearing, the senior years also entail physical and mental decline. It often falls to loved ones to look after a parent or spouse in need of constant care.

But who cares for the caregivers?

Alishia Freeman, executive director of SarahCare, an adult day care facility in Eagle, said statistics indicate caregivers are often in danger of harming their own emotional and physical well-being due to the stress and demands of caregiving responsibilities.

“They don’t take care of themselves,” Freeman said. “They need to read a book, take a nap, just decompress for a while.”

Facilities such as SarahCare exist to let family members leave loved ones in good hands while they grab some R&R. “That’s what we’re here for, is caregiver respite,” Freeman said.

“The caregivers forget to take care of themselves. There’s the potential of an abusive situation because of the frustrations,” said Sarah Rial, a medical social worker at Gritman Adult Day Health in Moscow.

“They don’t know how to get help,” Rial’s supervisor, Barbara Mahoney, director of Gritman Adult Day Health, said. In this way, facilities such as Gritman provide an invaluable service to the care provider by giving him or her time off to look after personal needs.

Many caregivers also have other commitments they must keep – including full-time employment.

An assisted living facility in Glenns Ferry called Poplar Grove offers day care and respite care and, in a unique twist, offers its own caregiver service.

“It’s hard taking care of an elderly person. All of a sudden your prior lifestyle is turned upside down. All the things you used to do, you now can’t,” Poplar Grove Administrator Bonnie Graver said.

Poplar’s day care service allows an elderly individual to be dropped off during the day for anywhere from one to eight hours, one to seven days a week. “Whatever the family needs,” Graver said.

Under respite care, the elderly can come to the facility to stay while their family is on vacation.

With the Poplar Grove caregiver program, trained individuals can relieve family members by going into the home to look after older folks; or, they can look in on an elderly person who is living alone without full-time supervision.

Poplar’s caregivers undergo thorough training and, Graver said, “I know their ethics,” meaning she trusts their reliability and integrity.

Businesses can sometimes be unforgiving in the face of caregiver needs for time off. Employees are often required to take unpaid leave in such circumstances or use up vacation time, according to Rial, who said she personally knows of one woman who is in fear of losing her job over her frequent absences in seeing after an aging parent.

“I don’t think businesses give enough time to that,” Mahoney said.

But Freeman said that as a person who runs a small business herself, she understands the business’s perspective. “It’s a fine line,” she said. “With small companies you try to be flexible (with workers), but it’s hard when you’re counting on an employee to be there.”

On the other hand, “it’s hard to be a caregiver. I know from personal experience because I cared for my husband who was injured in Iraq,” Freeman said.

Some needs are more complicated than others. Looking after someone who is physically frail and needs help getting in and out of the shower is one thing. But there is a whole other area in the spectrum of growing old that gives the most patient individual pause: Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

The aforementioned facilities, and others, can see to a person in the throes of a deteriorating mental condition, but a facility called Emerson House in Boise is just one of many that specializes in care for Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers. Emerson House offers respite and day care options to caregivers, according to its executive director, Eric Collett.

“Respite care is basically like permanent residency in that (the older person) is here around the clock. Frequently it comes up that families are going to be out of town, or perhaps have business commitments and can’t be home when they normally would be,” Collett said. “Caregivers also frequently benefit from having periodic breaks.”

The day care option allows family to leave a loved one for up to 14 hours a day at Emerson House, but generally the stay is for a shorter duration. “A number of people come here for day care because their family members work. They drop them off on their way to work and pick them up on their way home,” Collett said.

The Emerson House philosophy is one of caring for the whole individual, according to the administrator. “Our role is to provide opportunity for residents to continue to engage in life in meaningful ways,” Collett said.

As the aging population continues to grow, ways to meet the needs of the elderly and the people who care for them will present ongoing challenges for society. Previous ways of looking at these situations must be come at from a new perspective.

Places such as Emerson House engage residents in activities such as music and storytelling, and emphasize socializing.

“I think the old mindset about caring for elders is to provide them a place that meets their physical needs and keeps them relatively comfortable. … We try to serve the whole person and allow them to feel good about their lives each day,” Collett said.

Time-out for the caregiver allows them to continue to experience the whole sphere of living life to the fullest as well, and that is equally important.