By Kristi Tanner
Detroit Free Press
The calls often sound the same to Stefanie Sinks when family members with aging loved ones wait too long to reach out: “We’re in a crisis. We need some help. … What do we do?”
“Care management unfortunately is often reactive,” said Sinks. “I want to make sure everybody has the same sheet of music in front of them and we are all looking at the same thing.”
Sinks, 54, is a geriatric care manager — a sort-of elder care conductor — hired to coordinate doctors, navigate living facilities and manage crises so people don’t have to figure it out alone. Experts say the position is part of a small, but emerging field that can help the growing number of older adults navigate the aging process more smoothly with an advocate by their side.
Geriatric care manager Stefanie Sinks, right, started working with Brecon Village resident Anita Rochefort, 74 and at left, about six years ago. Rochefort, a former medical technologist, lives with traumatic brain injury and spinal cord damage after a two-seater plane she was traveling in crashed in May 2012. She said she doesn’t know what she’d do without Sinks. (Detroit Free Press)
Typically geriatric care managers are social workers, nurses, gerontologists, counselors, psychologists or occupational therapists who get additional training and, in some cases, certification through organizations like the Aging Life Care Association.
For Sinks, her day can involve helping with the smallest of tasks, like getting a grab bar installed in a bathroom, to the more complicated, such as guiding the move into assisted living, a nursing home or setting up care to remain at home.
Full circle
One of Sinks’ longest-running clients first hired her to care for her dad and later herself.
Christy still lives in her own home and like most older adults wants to stay there as long as possible. Her two adult children live out of state. (The Free Press is using her first name only because she does not want to be identified publicly as living alone for safety reasons.)
Sinks works with her to create a safer home to age in place like installing shower grab bars or fixing the uneven walkway outside her front door. She goes with her to the doctor, talks through her concerns and knows her wishes if there is a time she cannot speak for herself.
“(Christy) is focused on having her ducks in a row,” Sinks said. “In Christy’s case, more often than not, I am a sounding board.”
Sinks is Christy’s designated patient advocate and medical power of attorney.
The designation is something Sinks says she considers carefully on a case by case basis when she receives a request.
Knowing the role often gets activated in a crisis, when there’s a lack of capacity due to a stroke or accident, for example, Sinks said she is very mindful of her caseload.
“Desperation,” Christy said, is what led her to a geriatric care manager for her father. Her mother had just died, and her father was already showing signs of cognitive decline, she said.
Despite her background as a registered nurse, Christy, the only family member in town, couldn’t do it alone.
“I was feeling it was falling all to me, and I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “So I just started researching what to do and geriatric care management came up.”
Christy began working with Sinks when her father’s first geriatric care manager was set to retire.
Her father, a retired professor and musician, was “very smart, very independent and very resistant to any kind of help whatsoever,” she said.
Her father had moved from home to the hospital and assisted living and then back home with 24-hour care, and “somehow … he was OK with it.”
He was back in the familiar map he’d lived in for 60 years. “It really helped,” she said.
He even got back to playing his jazz trombone, Christy said, something he could not do in a facility.
She keeps a photo of her father, in his mid-90s, playing the trombone, at home on her dresser.
“It feels like that was such an accomplishment to be able to give him the peace and the fun still at that age after all he had been through,” Christy said.
MI Options offers free one-on-one counseling for older adults and people with disabilities on long-term care needs and Medicare assistance. Reach them at 800-803-7174.To locate an aging life professional visit the Aging Life Care Association website: aginglifecare.org
Kristi Tanner is a data reporter. Contact her at ktanner@freepress.com
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