Working Together – Bringing in Professional Caregivers and Family Caregiving: How to Work Alongside In-Home Care Professionals

Payton Ryan
13 minutes ago
5 min read

When caring for a loved one, you may quickly find that you are unable to personally meet all of their needs, or that their needs are beyond what you can reasonably manage effectively. It can feel defeating to admit that you may need help. However, when caregiving, an effective team can make all the difference in your loved one’s safety, health outcomes, and quality of life. Additionally, this can help you as the caregiver to manage your stress and feelings of overwhelm, allowing you to continue caregiving for your loved one.

One of the best ways you can care for your loved one, is to acknowledge when help is needed and learn how to bring it that help. In this article, we’re going to talk about how to build a blended team of professional caregivers and informal/family caregivers to ensure your loved one has all the support they need to live a long and healthy life. Let’s dive in.

Benefits of Blending Professional and Family Caregiving

Every person working to care for your loved one has a common goal – to make your loved one as healthy, safe, and comfortable as possible. The more people looking out for your loved one’s best interests, the better, right?

Here are some of the benefits of an integrated approach:

Information share. Working with a diverse group that includes both people most familiar with your loved one and people more familiar with ailment-specific care can create the best of both worlds. With diverse perspectives, your loved one should experience better outcomes thanks to the information you’re capable of providing one another to fill in gaps that would otherwise exist.
Offers you as the family caregiver support. You, the family caregiver, play an integral role in your loved ones care. Working with professional caregivers to offer you a sense of peace that you may have a hard time finding on your own. Especially when considering tough decisions or care tasks that make you uncomfortable. For example, you may debate how best to administer a medication or may feel generally uncomfortable with injections. Professional caregivers can offer in valuable support support on these daily tasks you’d otherwise have to figure out on your own.
Burden share. Providing care to another person is emotionally, mentally, and physically taxing. Having even just one other person to distribute the workload with can make a big difference in preventing caregiver burnout, your own potential for worsening health, stress, etc. by offering respite and recharge periods that could otherwise be hard to come by.

How to Collaborate and Blend the Teams Effectively

If you, while caring for your loved one, are used to doing everything on your own, bringing someone else into the fold may feel like a bit of a challenge. Suddenly, you have someone new you need to inform of your decisions, update as the day goes on, and ask questions to stay in the loop where you once had all the information. Here are a few tips to help you collaborate with another person for your loved one’s benefit:

Communicate. The most important thing you can do when collaborating on care is communicate. To do this, take advantage of the many ways technology makes this process easier. You can work with basic tools, like text messages and phone calls, or take it a step further and try out the caregiving-focused apps designed for this exact process. These tools can make collaboration and communication infinitely easier.
Meet regularly. Schedule recurring meetings between yourself, the professional caregiver(s), the loved one receiving care, and any other family members or friends who are involved. This gives you a chance to collaborate, exchange ideas, address concerns, make plans, and share updates. This is also a great place to set goals and identify any needed changes to keep everyone on the same page.
Establish clear roles and boundaries. Assumptions make it very easy for tasks to get lost in the shuffle, which will only be to your loved ones detriment. Clearly defining each person‘s expectations, tasks, and purposes helps to minimize gaps in care, dropped balls, and hurt feelings.
Set up an emergency plan and communication chain. With more people involved in the day-to-day efforts of care, it’s important that everyone is on the same page about what to do and who to contact in what order. This ensures that emergency situations are handled responsibly no matter who happens to be around when it strikes.
Be flexible. There is no plan that goes off without a hitch. Unexpected situations, changes, or schedule conflicts are bound to happen. Being flexible and adaptable can help everyone respond effectively as the situation changes.
Celebrate together. It doesn’t have to be completely about the work. Whenever someone goes above and beyond, works hard, takes on an extra task, gets something done effectively, or makes someone else’s day better, acknowledge it. Celebrate your successes when things go well — teamwork isn’t always easy.

Identify the Team

When assembling a team to help provide care for your loved one there are a few different ways to identify them:

Core team: these are direct care providers, including both yourself and any regularly seen doctors, pharmacists, dentists, and nurses.
Contingency team: these are teams brought in as needed, for example, in the event of an emergency or something specific (like surgery).
Coordinating team: this team is responsible for managing communication and coordinating care between the two above teams. This can include yourself, caseworkers, or volunteer support staff, for example.

These distinctions can help you create contact lists and phone trees for your emergency preparedness plans.

Closing Thoughts

It may seem like an adjustment to bring in professional caregiver help if you’ve been handling everything on your own up to this point. But if it’s starting to feel overwhelming, taking over your life, or making it hard to manage your other responsibilities, working with a team can make both your life and the loved one in your care’s life significantly better.

The journey of caring for a loved one can be incredibly challenging and isolating. But you are not alone. If you need support of any kind, we have an article here that lists some of the Free Resources and Support available to Family Caregivers in Orange County, California.