Louise Phipps Senft Presents “Tips on How to Deal with End of Life Decisions and Preserve the Integrity and Love of Your Family” at National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers Conference, Towson, MD

Tips on How to Deal with End of Life Decisions and Preserve the Integrity and Love of Your Family

Families today are assuming responsibility for the informal care of over 75 percent of elderly family members and are often faced with difficult decisions from a bewildering array of choices:  e.g. alternative living arrangements, financial issues, and multidisciplinary care.  In the best of circumstances, this can be a stressful process and sometimes leads to disagreements, confusion, and conflict at a time when the best intentions of the family are to work together for the needs of a loved and respected aging family member.

 What is elder care mediation?  How can a mediator assist with exploring sensitive issues and making informed decisions? What is family conflict and when and how do we surpass it?

Who can and who cannot be involved in the process? How do you convince your loved ones to participate? And how do you deal with situations when family members have become estranged? Or when their mental capabilities have been affected by severe illness?

One of the goals of this presentation is to help geriatric care professionals find answers to all of these questions in a manner that is applicable to their everyday work with elder patients and their friends and relatives, as well as inform the audience about the benefits of mediation so they can then make this tool available to their patients and other interested parties.

            The objectives are centered around:

• creating a link between eldercare professionals and the conflict resolution world, so we can better assist each other with continuous and improved learning;
•  expanding the networking capacities of our fields of expertise;
• creating an educational connection in order to better the quality of our work and care and assist our patients and clients in a more effective way.

            The objectives of the presentation are as follows:

1. Define conflict and assess conflict experiences;
2. Differentiate the types of disputes and conflicts that are specific to the elderly, identify and analyze the most negative aspects and select strategies to overcome difficulties and enable transformation towards something more positive;
3. Explain conflict transformation theory, review main steps in the process and recommend best practices to employ when dealing with elderly conflict;
4. Compare conflict transformation to other forms of conflict management, determine its advantages and  how can it be integrated into elder care practice;
5. Illustrate ways in which elder care providers apply conflict transformation skills to produce better quality results;
6. Indicate modalities for conflict resolution practitioners and elder care providers to create connections between practices and solve conflicts in a more time and cost efficient manner;
7. Review main points of the mediation/conflict transformation process and evaluate its applications in the geriatric care field;
8. Recommend next steps for elder care professionals in order to design specific conflict transformation levers within their organizations.