Being responsible for the care of a loved one at home can seem to be overwhelming. The challenge lies in coordinating the care and services being provided by a range of individuals and service providers. As the care needs increase, managing the accumulated tasks and responsibilities takes more time and effort.
Up until now, there has not been a system or program to help you manage your loved one’s care. Now there is one.
Managing the care of an older person involves coordinating a wide range of tasks that may involve multiple caregivers and service providers. Since the older person’s needs are fluid, staying on top of things requires identifying changing needs and finding the appropriate responses. Some needs can simply be addressed once, but many are recurring and often affect how on addresses other chronic needs. Being responsible for someone’s care may require constant attention to the wide variety of daily activities related to toileting, walking, eating, sleeping, dressing, medications, bathing, home care visits, treatments, glasses, hearing aids, other equipment, daycare, transportation, and doctors’ appointments. The key to successful care lies in the timing and coordination of all these activities. That complexity makes it difficult to explain and a challenge to delegate. This may leave you stressed and having to do it alone.
The Jointly app is easy to use, and it costs the family nothing. It has been successfully used in the UK for over 10 years by 30,000 people. It has been continually refined with the ongoing feedback from hundreds of families. Community Aging Circles USA, an affiliate of CarersUK, is now making the Jointly app available in the US. The app facilitates connecting the family with existing resources in the community and eliminates the isolation of the older person and their primary caregiver. The technology makes it possible for families to recognize and easily access the resources.
By having everyone in a person’s circle of care connected and using the app, it is easier to organize and manage the myriad tasks involved in caregiving. That alone relieves the enormous burden of walking around all day worrying about what comes next, what am I forgetting, frightened that you will let something fall off your plate.
Many older people have friends, acquaintances, and neighbors with whom they have been connected, but with changes in the older person’s life, those connections may be lost and render them unavailable to help with caregiving. The app enables you to allow these people to remain connected and play a role in the older person’s circle of care.
Keeping open lines of communication between everyone in the circle of care and the person’s healthcare provider(s) can also be a challenge. By giving the healthcare team access to the older person’s current symptoms and medications, as well as information about their daily activities, they can more efficiently prescribe interventions that address their patients’ needs.
The app can be loaded on the smartphones or tablets of everyone in the person’s circle of care. From the app’s easy-to-use dashboard, everyone can be given access to the relevant information critical to their specific role in the caregiving of the older person.
The app enables you to organize all the tasks and assign them to the appropriate person(s) in the circle of care. The app’s calendar will display the details of the tasks so everyone can see what needs to be done and when. The app also makes it easy to send out reminders to those responsible for a particular task and for them to notify you that the task has been completed. What makes the Jointly app easy to use and stand out is that it has integrated calendaring, contacts, messaging, and critical information display. This reduces the burden on everyone and ensures that everyone is on the same page in caring for the older person. A brief overview of the functionality of the Jointly app can be found in the video.