Two Tools for Getting You and Your Parent Organized
If you’re like many of us who are helping with our parent’s care, managing our own lives and possibly those of our children, anything that can save time, minimize effort and reduce the chance of a regrettable error is something worth considering. I ran across these, as with most things, while looking for something else. At first blush, they appear to be similar in what they try to accomplish (i.e., saving time, money, lives, etc.), but they approach care giving from different angles.
The Senior Organizer: Personal, Medical, Legal, Financial
The title is pretty self explanatory. This is a book, largely of forms that helps organize critical information that will be important during medical emergencies, diminished mental capacity and ultimately the death of a loved one. The Senior Organizer has a place to put all the information that you’re going to need for a number of situations.
Up front, the organizer has an index to the most important information in the book for emergency situations. It simply points the reader to the most important pages, like: specific information on the senior, emergency contacts, medications and other information stored in the book that can be important to have in an emergency. Overall, the book has two major sections after that that contain “personal & medical” and “legal & financial”.
The personal and medical section includes everything from doctors, doctor visits and prescriptions, to insurance and contact information.
The legal and financial is as you would expect, including information on banks, taxes, real estate holdings, insurance, health directives and end-of-life documents like wills.
This may seem like something you could do on your own, and it is, but the value that the editors of The Senior Organizer bring is their thoroughness and that they’ve packaged it into a very usable book. A thoughtful bonus is that buying the book entitles you to free downloads of new pages if you have to revise or add anything, or if you want to create a notebook instead of keeping it in a paperback.
One caution that I would make is that the book has places for information (Social Security number, date of birth, and credit card numbers) that would be ideal for identity theft, or outright theft. It should be agreed that this kind of information be kept in a more secure location.
Family Caregiver Organizer: A Personal and Medical Journal for Care-receivers and Their Caregiver(s)
The Family Caregiver Organizer is singularly focused on health care and, I would argue, on individuals who receive a lot of health care. The organizer is spiral bound and a little friendlier for every day use than The Senior Organizer. The bulk of the organizer is monthly logs that include: My Calendar, Questions for the Doctor, Lab Tests, Medications and daily logs among other things. There are six months of logs and you can order more pages.
Up front is, “All About the Care-receiver”, including sections called My Health Now and My Health History.
The organizer includes a Family Caregiver Answer Book, a reminder booklet for caregivers called, Caring for the Caregiver and a File of Life, covered recently here on SHF.
My take? I’ve ordered both for my parents.
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