Caregiving

Dick Weinman is an AARP volunteer and an assisted living guru

Family caregivers are giving one of the most important gifts of all this holiday season – their love and care even while they hold down paid employment. New AARP Oregon research shows that many family caregivers are still in the workforce and doing double duty for their employer and their family members.

Dick Weinman is an AARP volunteer and an assisted living guru

By Mac McLean

In five years as an Oregon Long Term Care Ombudsman volunteer, I’ve seen a lot, sometimes inspiring, occasionally appalling. We are free, confidential advocates for the rights, dignity, and quality of life of adults in licensed nursing, residential care, assisted living, and adult foster care homes, where we visit, get to know residents, investigate complaints, watch and listen for problems and, with the resident’s approval, work to resolve them.

In our culture, the ALF – and the other acronymed places for the elderly, fragile, and disabled – constitutes both the family, those at-hand, and village, out-there in the social order. The caregiver is the person at-hand in assisted living. For me, she – and it’s almost always she - cleans my glasses, opens my mail, dresses and undresses me, showers me, puts me on and takes me off the toilet, wipes me. What kind of person does it take to do all that – with heartfelt feeling?

AARP Oregon salutes Oregon's nearly 470,000 family caregivers during November's National Family Caregiver Month. We also recognize it's a tough job. A bit of rest now and then, or "respite care," helps prevent significant stress and burnout that can lead to worse health for the caregiver, and diminish the caregiver's ability to provide good care to their loved one. Caregivers need short breaks!

By Dick Weinman, AARP Volunteer and Assisted Living Guru

Bobby Heagerty has education in her blood. Born into a family of educators, teaching became her professional path as well. But a fascination with the brain led her out of the K-12 classroom environment and toward Oregon Health and Sciences University where her innovative adult education and outreach programs eventually resulted in her receiving the neuroscience educator of the year in 2013 from the Society of Neuroscience, the first non-neuroscientist to receive it.

Veterans Day is a good time to remind our friends and family who served their country in the military that veterans are a special target for some kinds of frauds and cons warns AARP Oregon.