Agents under an Advance Health Care Directive – Lighten up for Best Results

If you are serving as agent under an Advance Health Care Directive, you are no doubt bringing your principal for the annual flu shot. Research suggests that watching a light movie or other entertainment prior to the shot, may improve its benefit!

See this New York Times Article for more information.

Guidebook available to Pennsylvania’s family caregivers

To help address caregiver issues and to better respond to the needs of family caregivers, the Pennsylvania Department of Aging (PDA) partnered with the Pennsylvania Homecare Association (PHA) to distribute a new, helpful resource for caregivers. PHA, which represents more than 700 home health, hospice and homecare agencies across the state, developed a free 48-page guidebook, titled “Secrets No One Told You About Family Caregiving.” The guidebook features tips, tricks and helpful hints for caregivers caring for a loved one, including how to prepare your home for care, equipment that helps and ways to help make ends meet. This resource book is available to family caregivers and PHA member agencies to order and distribute in their communities.

More than 1.8 million Pennsylvanians are family caregivers. On a daily basis, these individuals work in conjunction with professional caregivers from homecare, home health and hospice agencies so that their loved ones can stay at home and have care provided safely and efficiently. Family caregiving is not an easy job, and this resource is designed to answer questions and offer advice about caregiving. To order the book or find out more about family caregiving, call 800-382-1211 ext. 21 or email yourpartner@pahomecare.org.

If you fly, consider placing a tracking chip on your expensive wheelchair.

Airlines have a reputation for losing expensive wheelchairs, even on direct flights. Regulations which would have made airlines accountable have been delayed. Click here to read this NPR article for a full report about the issue. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to place a tile tracker or some other similar device on the wheelchair to locate it if it is lost.

Book Review:The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics

This book reveals the ways a physician may direct care. It also points out the need to appoint a strong Agent under your Advance Health Care Directive. Either way, it is a good read for patients and medical workers alike.

Quote from Amazon is below :

…As a practicing physician and longtime member of his hospital’s ethics committee, Dr. Barron Lerner thought he had heard it all. But in the mid-1990s, his father, an infectious diseases physician, told him a stunning story: he had physically placed his body over an end-stage patient who had stopped breathing, preventing his colleagues from performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, even though CPR was the ethically and legally accepted thing to do. Over the next few years, the senior Dr. Lerner tried to speed the deaths of his seriously ill mother and mother-in-law to spare them further suffering.

These stories angered and alarmed the younger Dr. Lerner—an internist, historian of medicine, and bioethicist—who had rejected physician-based paternalism in favor of informed consent and patient autonomy. The Good Doctor is a fascinating and moving account of how Dr. Lerner came to terms with two very different images of his father: a revered clinician, teacher, and researcher who always put his patients first, but also a physician willing to “play God,” opposing the very revolution in patients’ rights that his son was studying and teaching to his own medical students.

The book is available here at Amazon .