Caregiving Journals—Why This May Be The Best Tool For Caring For Your Senior Parent

Whether your senior parent lives alone with assistance, or lives with you, his or her care needs and health status change constantly. The local senior caregivers at BlueSea Care, recommend that, for adults managing their senior parents’ care, a caregiving journal offers the best way to ensure a continuity of care, while also giving them the documentation they need to best navigate this process.

What is a Caregiving Journal?

A caregiving journal allows you to document invaluable information in relation to your aging parent. In it, you keep track of everything pertinent to your parent’s care, including medical appointments, medications and dosages (including changes to these with dates), therapy schedules, sitter schedules, incidents worth noting, and general observations. Your journal should also include questions for upcoming doctor’s appointments, as well as any over the counter medications or supplements, even if part of this is treated by local senior caregivers.

Why is a Caregiving Journal Important?

• When put on the spot in a medical appointment or emergency, you may easily forget important information. Your journal safeguards your parent from forgotten information that could lead to inaccurate diagnosis, prescribing, or treatment. For dementia and Alzheimer’s, the journal also acts as a recorded timeline of abilities and issues so that your medical provider can better gauge symptom progression.

• A caregiving journal helps prevent burnout or overexposure from blinding you to changes in your parent’s behavior, abilities, or health. When you face the stress of managing your parent’s care, you deal with his or her needs on a daily basis. Without conscious journaling, you may be missing the proverbial forest for the trees. For example, searching for words, increasing clumsiness, and changes in speech patterns may come on slowly. You may not see these as symptoms until they progress dramatically. Your journal highlights day-to-day changes and helps bring them to your conscious attention.

• Doctors have limited time to spend with patients, and every moment that you fumble to remember, fail to articulate details, or ask the right questions takes away from your parent’s care. With the help of your journal, you make the most of every moment with medical providers through clear and concise details.

• Lastly, your journal acts as a safeguard against your absence. If you need to take a trip, fall ill, or are otherwise unavailable, others can use your journal to maintain a continuity of care for your parent, such as local senior caregivers.

Caregiving journals sound like extra work, but they truly require mere minutes of effort each day and provide enormous benefits. Our team encourages you to consider adding a journal to your daily routine to ensure that your parent continues to receive the best care and attention each and every day.