How to Manage Nursing Care at Home

According to AARP (2015), 16.6%, one out of every six, of Americans provide unpaid care to an adult. In many cases, this care goes beyond custodial care and qualifies as skilled nursing care.

Imagine this: someone you care deeply about is being released from the hospital, given the alternatives of home care, hospice care, or a nursing home. You have to decide, or help them decide, which alternative is best. If you decide on home care, you may need to manage it. This book will help you understand how to provide skilled nursing care at home and will aid in your decision-making on whether to undertake this.

This book answers your primary questions: Why choose home care rather than care at a nursing facility? What will you need? Whom will you hire? When will they have to do what? Where in your home will they do it? How will you manage the care?

The authors make it easier for those who step forward to provide care in their home for a family member or friend, although not being trained medical professionals themselves. You can manage something without being an expert, but it does require a working knowledge of the major concepts and the implementation of some variety of systematization. Whether you are managing the care at home or just monitoring care being given at home by an agency, this book should be of assistance to you in understanding what is needed and what is being done.

The co-authors have been involved for over a decade in supplying and managing skilled nursing care at home for an immune-compromised quadriplegic patient who is on a ventilator and is fed and medicated through a gastric tube. The round-the-clock care mimics that which she received in the critical care unit of her regional hospital.

How to Manage Nursing Care at Home tells its readers what to expect and gives them the necessary information and structure, in terms of needed forms, "charts," to understand and oversee the nursing care given by RNs and LPNs.

As one expert notes: "...authors Douglas Winslow Cooper and Diane R. Beggin address one of the most complex global issues faced in the 21^st century: caring for someone you love, one who is also diagnosed with a severe medical condition, doing this safely, and in the home.... a valuable guide that will ease your worry as you begin your journey as one of the millions of untrained family caregivers who want to safely provide complex medical care services so that your loved one can remain home." (Eboni I. Green, PhD, RN, Co-Founder of Caregiver Support Services)