A Guide For
Caregiving
What’s Next? Planning for Safety, Quality, and Compassionate Care for Your Loved One and Yourself!
A Guide for Caregiving:
What’s Next?
Ideal for any caregiver providing care or assistance to a loved one or friend, the Guide is written in a conversational, easy-to-understand manner for family and friend caregivers.
Topics include overview of the caregiving role, safety considerations, patient advocacy, record keeping, infection control and prevention, and self-care for the caregiver.
Topics include various chronic conditions including alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, cancer, cardiac conditions, older adult care, end-of-life care and more.
As healthcare has become more complex, the book uses common terms and words to help you become a better communicator with health care professionals about your loved ones’ care. In this way you can become a vital part of the care team.
You know your loved one the best. This book provides a road map to help you advocate about your loved one’s unique needs. This includes preferences about meals, rest times, their usual routine, and comfort measures that work.
Regardless of the health care setting, safety is an important component of quality care. Safety encompasses everything from allergies to preventing falls. A knowledgeable caregiver is an important person who knows this information the best.
Pain and symptom management and the prevention of suffering are vital areas for the caregiver to monitor and communicate when needed. Efforts directed toward comfort and well-being are hallmarks of quality and patient-centered health care.
There are infection risks in all care settings. Because of this, an educated and observant caregiver plays an important role in advocacy and role-modeling. Wash your hands and ensure that all caregivers perform hand hygiene before any care.
Most people have more than one health concern. Because of this, the book provides information about a number of chronic conditions, allowing the caregiver to refer to specific topics based on their loved ones’ unique and holistic care needs.
At a time when healthcare issues are so critical in our country, interest in learning more about taking care of loved ones at home has grown.
Tina Marrelli, a home healthcare veteran, saw the need for better caregiving information after caring for her 96-year-old Father-in-law in her home for 3 years.
Tina learned that there are some basic skills and duties that can help the caregiver and “caregivee” (the person being cared for) through her personal experience. As a result, Tina has written a Guide to assist caregivers in their important roles.
Tina’s latest book is a valuable resource for any caregiver providing care or assistance to a loved one or a friend. Tina’s book covers topics such as patient advocacy, record keeping, infection control, Alzheimer’s and dementia care, stroke care and much, much more.
Tina is the author of more than a dozen books, including the Handbook of Home Health Standards: Quality, Documentation and Reimbursement, and The Nurse Manager Survival Guide. Tina has also written Caregiving Columns for local newspapers for more than 10 years.
The goal of this book is simple: To assist caregivers, who have little to no caregiving experience, to effectively care for a loved one. The book covers various types of care from temporary illness and chronic conditions to end-of-life care and is presented in an understandable manner.
“Author Tina Marrelli’s ‘Guide for Caregiving: What’s Next? Planning for Safety, Quality, and Compassionate Care for Your Loved One and Yourself’ offers tremendous insight and wisdom useful to anyone serving in a caregiving role. As a caregiver, and as an advocate for my fellow military and veteran caregivers, I know that resources like this guide play a critical role in helping us navigate the complex journey ahead.”
“This new book is written by one of the foremost experts in Home Care in the USA, Ms. Tina Marrelli. This book provides information for all caregivers that helps them understand the central importance of their role in the health care of their loved one. The caregivers are uniquely situated to be the key advocates for their loved one as the patient and family traverse the complexities of the health care system. Who knows their loved one better? Having access to the information in this book will provide the caregivers with many tools to help them achieve the highest possible quality of care and quality of life for their loved ones.”
“This is terrific! Not only as a nurse, but also as a family caregiver, I can truly appreciate Tina’s insightful guidance provided in this Guide for Caregiving. This information would have been a source of much needed insights years ago when I cared for my mother-in-law whose multiple medical conditions were compounded by dementia. It would also have provided much needed direction ten years ago when caring for my mother in her home after suffering a stroke that left her paralyzed on her left side, on tube feedings, and essentially bedridden. And today, as I care for a family member with diabetes and dementia and help a dear friend who requires fourteen prescription medications and a special diet to maintain medical stability, I can rely on this Guide for answers to the many issues that I face.”
“Tina Marrelli’s book is a “Life Saver.” Worry, doubt, confusion, depression, anger, and feelings of being overwhelmed were what I felt when I realized that I was the “Caregiver.” This book has transformed me into a confident caregiver knowing I could find the answer to most all situations I faced as a caregiver to a loved one and friend. It also made me realize the importance of taking care of myself. I would recommend this book to any professional or any person that find themselves in the caregiver position. It is a very valuable tool.”
As baby boomers care for their aging parents and set their own long-term goals, many are faced with caregiving for the first time. In A Guide For Caregiving: What’s Next? Planning for Safety, Quality, and Compassionate Care for Your Loved One and Yourself, one of the top names in home care nursing, Tina M. Marrelli, MSN, MA, RN, FAAN, offers support and information for readers faced with the challenge of becoming a caregiver, providing helpful answers to common questions and additional resources to educate and prepare readers for the realities of caregiving. Topics include creating and maintaining a care notebook, home care safety, infection control and prevention, advocacy and a glossary of health care terms. Marrelli has also included more specific sections for care related to Alzheimer’s, amputation, bedbound patients, cardiac issues, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, stroke care, end of life and hospice care.
In addition to family and friend caregivers, A Guide For Caregiving: What’s Next? may be helpful for clinicians to help their patients and their families better understand the complexity of the health care system.
The book is intentionally formatted to be able to be carried by readers who are on the go: a practical guidebook for facing caregiving challenges with a compassionate expert by the reader’s side. The book is available at www.marrelli.com
Marrelli is the author of numerous books, including the Handbook of Home Health Standards: Quality, Documentation and Reimbursement, the Nurse Manager’s Survival Guide and Hospice and Palliative Care Handbook: Quality, Compliance and Reimbursement.
Source: https://caregiver.com/cg-community/book-club/Guide-caregiving-whats-next/
We are grateful to receive the the 2020 Today’s Caregiver Friendly Award!
About The Caregiver Friendly Awards:
The Caregiver Friendly® Awards are presented by Today’s Caregiver magazine to celebrate outstanding books, media, products and services which have been designed with the best interest of the caregiver and his or her loved one in mind. Today’s Caregiver magazine and http://caregiver.com, launched in 1995, are published by Caregiver Media Group, which also produces the Fearless Caregiver Conferences.
https://caregiver.com/2020-award-winners/
https://caregiver.com/cg-community/book-club/Guide-caregiving-whats-next/
From Caring.com’s compilation of 2018’s best caregiving related books:
“Many caregivers wish their responsibilities came with a concise, comprehensive guide. “A Guide for Caregiving: What’s Next?” may just be the closest thing to it. Best-selling author and nurse Tina Marrelli covers almost every conceivable topic on caring for an elderly family member or friend.
From patient advocacy to end-of-life care, the book breaks down the sometimes impossibly difficult task of caring for another human being into manageable pieces. Her conversational approach makes challenging concepts more understandable for the average caregiver.”
See more: https://www.caring.com/articles/best-books-about-caregiving
A Guide for Caregiving: What’s Next? was awarded third place in the 2017 AJN Book of the Year Awards in the Consumer Health category.
If you are a nurse, physician or other health care professional, here is the first book to help you, the clinician, help your patients and families better understand the complexity of the health care system. Chronic conditions and other information is addressed in a manner that can be taught to your patients and patient families, as well as used in “teach-back” and other educational ways. This Guide can help put the clinicians, patient and family caregiver(s) on the same page and is written by well-known home care and hospice author Tina Marrelli. Tina sought to help care truly become “person-centered” and this Guide is a compassionate and common sense view of health care.
The Guide is written in a conversational manner for “lay” caregivers and is divided into two parts. The first part covers the administrative activities that helps one become an effective caregiver to their loved one, friend or the “caregivee”. Included are the caregiving role, skills needed, the care team in health care and the settings for care, advocacy, safety, infection control and prevention and much, much more! The second part is structured as conversational information about specific health problems which are organized alphabetically for ease of finding specific information. Some of the topics addressed include Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, care of the bedbound person, cancer care, diabetes care, older adult care, end-of-life, palliative and hospice care, medication management, and others.
In addition, there are many resources about where to find more information on given topics. Many books and resources address only one condition or health problem, but most people do not have just one problem. Like the old saying goes, the “hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone”- some conditions are interrelated. Marrelli writes “As healthcare has become more specialized and complex, sometimes it seems we have lost that holistic view of one person and their unique needs and wishes”. This Guide seeks to make health care understandable and help family, friends and other caregivers be valued and recognized as the expert on their loved one or “caregivee”. This Handbook is an adjunct to e-Caregiving.com, a web-based educational support system for family and friend caregivers that can be sponsored by health care organizations and provided to their community of patients and caregivers. For more information, visit www.e-Caregiving.com.