Social Work in Geriatric Home Health Care

Explore how community-based networks can effectively meet the needs and problems of sick, elderly people and their caregivers!Social Work in Geriatric Home Health Care: The Blending of Traditional Practice with Cooperative Strategies explores how social workers, aides, nurses, administrators, and policy makers can cooperatively work by maintaining appropriate health records in order to keep the elderly living at home. Based on the author’s twenty-five years of social work experience in geriatric home care case management, this book explores improved ways to organize home health care by use of cooperative strategies in order to assist older individuals in living independent lives at home. Complete with informative case studies and interviews, you will explore useful examples of geriatric social work practice through Concerned Home Managers for the Elderly, (COHME) a nonprofit, licensed home health care agency. Social Work in Geriatric Home Health Care examines many crucial geriatric care and case management issues of concern to geriatric social workers, including:

• offering meaningful and fulfilling work as a home health care aide
  
• providing high-quality training and ongoing education for home care aides
  
• creating a cooperative environment by encouraging staff, social workers, and nurses to share expertise with the case management coordinators who are responsible for placing the geriatric patient at home or in a special care facility
  
• involving the client in the management of his or her own health care
  
• creating concise, one-page reports for each home visit by using a “One-Sheet” to help you extract case assessments and plans for your geriatric client in a readily accessible format
  
• dealing with state regulatory authorities and the general trend in home health care to place the elderly in nursing homes
  
• paying careful attention to financial and administrative problems within your organization while striving to remain true to your original mission of providing at-home care
  
  Social Work in Geriatric Home Health Care will help you explore a different way of organizing home health care for the sick and elderly at a time when the percentage of people over sixty-five who will require care is rapidly increasing. This important book works to improve the case management of geriatric people and challenges home health care workers and legislators to become more progressive in their thinking about the direction in which geriatric health care should move at the turn of the century. With this vital book, you will gain insight into organized and cooperative methods of providing home health care for the elderly and find improved methods for managing your geriatric cases to give your clients optimum care.