Additional Resources Mentioned

Slides used in episode here

Caring Our Way community here

Family Emergency Plan space on Caring Our Way here

Schedule of free planning sessions with consultant here

 

Takeaways

Tip 1: Name Your Worry

 

The first step in creating an emergency plan is identifying specific concerns that keep you up at night. Denise’s Family Emergency Plan includes eight categories of common caregiver worries:

– Delays

– Health emergencies

– Hospitalizations

– Behavioral challenges

– Transportation issues

– Medication management

– Care coordination

– Communication needs

 

Tip 2: Develop Your Plan

 

Once you’ve identified your concerns, it’s time to create actionable plans. Remember that plans can take many forms:

– Written instructions

– Maps or diagrams

– Medication lists

– Contact information

– Behavior management strategies

– Transportation arrangements

 

Tip 3: Communicate Your Plan

 

Effective communication ensures everyone involved understands their role. Consider multiple methods of sharing information:

– Written letters or emails

– Shared online documents

– In-person meetings

– Physical copies in accessible locations

– Regular updates and reminders

 

Tip 4: Update Your Plan Regularly

 

Emergency plans should evolve as circumstances change. Watch for these common triggers that signal the need for updates:

– Changes in your care recipient’s condition

– New diagnoses or medications

– Shifts in your own availability

– Family member changes

– Service provider updates

– Transitions to palliative or hospice care

 

About Our Guest Expert

 

Denise Brown founded the Caring Our Way community to support family caregivers. The community offers free resources, including:

– Monthly planning sessions

– Family Care Manager course

– Downloadable planning templates

– Online support spaces

– Access to certified caregiving consultants

 

You can find these resources at caringourway.com.

 

Read More in This Blog here 

 

Full Episode Transcript

Nancy Treaster 

Do you want to calm your worries and sleep better at night? Of course you do. Every worry needs a plan. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Today, in this episode, Sue and I are talking with Denise Brown from the Caring Our Way community. We’re gonna talk about how to create a plan to calm those worries.

 

And we’re gonna focus specifically in this episode on family emergency plans. Denise and Sue, let’s get started.

 

Sue Ryan 

All right, Denise, it is such an honor to have you with us today sharing. Your messages have touched so many lives and many of our listeners may already know you. Let me introduce you a little bit and then I’d like you to give some background. You began your journey of helping people who help family members back in 1990. You began your first of several businesses in 1995 and are here today representing your Caring Our Way community. Tell us a little bit about this community you’ve created that is so powerful and valuable.

 

Denise 

First of all, Nancy and Sue, it is a thrill to be with you today. I’m so looking forward to our conversation. Caring Our Way is a community for anyone who’s caring for a family member or if you’ve previously cared for a family member. And the goal is that the community provides something that you might need in this moment. It could be that you need to hear encouraging words or read encouraging words or attend one of our workshops or events or connect to someone else in a similar situation, we really want you to know that there’s a community of support behind you. It can feel so lonely when you’re caring for someone. We want you to know you’re not alone. We’re here with you.

 

Sue Ryan

Denise, I think it’s so powerful that you really do engage and bring people together. And one of the things that you’ve done with the resources you provide and with your community is you’re making it very easy for people to engage with you because it’s all free. mean, everything we’re talking about today, we’re talking about incredibly valuable resources, both personally, professionally, and also through documents that we’ll share the links for.

 

Denise

It’s all free. Yes. Yes.

 

Sue Ryan

And for caregivers where our finances are something we’re so concerned about, you’re doing this and everything is free. So let’s talk a little bit about worry and caregiving. These are two words that are so connected on our caregiving journeys. And I say that worry is a wasted emotion that sucks energy out of the universe and adds no value.

 

The reason I say that is because I so often see people who say, am so worried. And then they put a period after it and they take no action. They do nothing about it. And Denise, you’re all about giving people ways to take that action, to do something with that worry. And one of them is these plans you’ve created. Introduce us a little bit more to what these plans look like.

 

Denise

You know, something that you mentioned, Sue, reminds me of why I like to connect with family caregivers every day, because they teach me every day. And what they teach me becomes what solution I can offer. So for instance, I regularly survey family caregivers to ask about their experiences. And I did a survey that included a question of whether or not you have a backup plan. And 74 % of survey respondents said no.

 

And I thought that is such a large percentage of people that are just doing it without thinking through who else could help or are doing it without having the time to think through what else could help or just really believing there’s no other help. I must do this alone. And I started thinking through, well, what’s the solution if you feel like there is no backup? I pivoted to thinking about what I was doing with my parents and helping them. And I landed on one of my life guidances, which is every worry needs a plan. I used that, I know I use that in like, every day I pretty much pivot to every worry needs a plan. So I thought, okay, if we can name our worry around who’s my backup, or what do I do in case of an emergency, then we can really start thinking through, well, what’s the plan for that?

 

Sue Ryan

Love them.

 

Denise 

We don’t have to put a period on, I don’t have a backup. We can really turn it into an and. I may not have a backup now, and I’m working to plan so that there is some other option for me.

 

Sue Ryan

Beautiful. That is so powerful.

 

Denise

And because this is sometimes what feels like an overwhelming process of trying to figure out what do I do when I need a backup but I don’t have access to one, we do free monthly planning sessions with myself and certified caregiving consultants because we know that sometimes you’re so stuck in the weeds that it’s hard to see through what could be another option. We love to get together and talk to family caregivers and figure out what’s the plan that could work.

 

In addition, we have a space on our Carrying Our Way community that’s just devoted to family emergency planning. So you can join that space, you can register for an event, you can ask us questions. We are really available to help and support you. It is a priority for us to really take down that 74 % to zero. We want everyone to feel like, okay, I’ve been worrying about this and now I understand what I can do about it.

 

Nancy Treaster 

All right, so we’re ready to bring up the process.

 

Sue Ryan

Let’s do it.

 

Denise 

Yeah.

 

Nancy Treaster 

All right. So this process actually becomes the foundation for our tips. So Denise, let’s go through the process and then we’ll cover each one in more detail.

 

Denise 

Yeah, so the first step is to name the worry and then you develop the plan and then you communicate the plan and then you update the plan regularly so the plan still works for you.

 

Nancy Treaster

Wonderful. And we’ll put links to everything that you already discussed in terms of how to get to Caring Our Way, how to get to the Family Emergency Plan, all those links and everything will go in the show notes.

 

All right, let’s, are we ready to go to tip one?

 

Denise 

Yeah.

 

Nancy Treaster 

All right, let’s talk about naming the worry.

 

Denise

I think it’s important to define worry and I think of it as what keeps you up at night or what’s the thought that haunts you.

 

And then if we get a little more specific, we could look at categories. 

On our family emergency plan, we include eight categories, eight different words. You might look at this and think, all these categories don’t apply to my situation, which is okay. We just really wanted to give you a start and inspire you to think about, what really is the particular category that I’m most worried about?

 

Sue Ryan

And Denise, one of the things I think is so important about this is that because you’ve got the consulting and again, it’s complimentary, but because you’ve got that, you can help people customize their wheel to their specific needs. And then also as those needs change, they’ll be able to adapt it.

 

Denise 

Yes, and what I also like is for each family caregiver these words might mean something different. For instance, delays. It could be, I’m delayed getting home from work and the home health aide needs to leave. But it could be a different kind of delay. We’re delayed in getting to a doctor’s appointment. So you can think through what each one means for you and then figure out what’s the plan for it.

 

Nancy Treaster

And this is a great starting point. For me, hospitalization and someone having to go to the hospital really worried me the most. And so I went to Denise’s course and created a family emergency plan. And part of that was for my father-in-law, he was 90 at Alzheimer’s and my mother-in-law was his primary caregiver. had part-time caregivers as well, in addition to her, and I was their main support system. So I put together a family emergency plan for my father-in-law going to the hospital. And then my mother-in-law actually fell and had to go to the hospital. And I realized I had not put any plan together. If she went to the hospital, we were actually completely lost. I thought I’d done such a good job of planning. So it’s a good example of when you do get help going through the wheel, don’t just think about your care receiver, think about other things that might happen. That was a good way that I could have used, probably leveraged some of the consulting since I did it myself. I could have used a third party to help me think it a little bit more thoroughly all the way through as opposed to just doing it myself. But lesson learned, you guys can learn from me.

 

Denise 

And you know what I think is also helpful to remember? You created a plan for your father-in-law. And rather than starting scratch for your mother-in-law, it’s duplicating that plan and then tweaking it and making it personal for your mother-in-law. And then it’s tweaking it again for you.

 

Nancy Treaster

That’s so true. That’s exactly right.

 

Sue Ryan

So you don’t have to, as they say, recreate the wheel every time. You create it, but you don’t have to recreate it. there you go. Well, you’re very welcome. So we started off by developing the wheel and we’ll customize what these categories are. Let’s talk about the next tip, which is developing the plan. What does that look like, Denise?

 

Denise

And it’s helpful.

 

Exactly, Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Sue. Thank you, Sue.

 

Nancy Treaster 

Literally.

 

Sue Ryan

We’ve named the worry and we’re talking about the family emergencies. Tip two is now let’s develop the plan that supports taking action about this worry.

 

Denise

That’s to make a plan. And it’s important to think of a plan in a way that’s outside the box. So a plan could be a map, it could be instructions, it could be a list of your caries medications, it could be a solution for challenging behaviors, if there’s a hospitalization, for instance. And we use this plan wheel to help you think through what the plan could look like. We include the word experiment because it’s helpful to try something without worrying about whether you’re gonna fail at it. If you’re experimenting, there is no failure. So it could be, for instance, that for you, you define a family emergency as you’re late coming home from work because of a delay and the home health aide has to leave. What you could think through is, “What could I try that could help if I’m delayed?” And then you think through what could you try? You track what works when you’re trying, and then based on what works, that becomes your plan. I really like that we can experiment to see what works so that we give ourselves the room to figure it out.

 

Nancy Treaster 

Yeah, I like that too. I think one thing to help our listeners, Denise, particularly those people who are not looking at the wheel who are listening on audio only, is all of this will be in the show notes. So when we talk about the wheels, we’re really just looking at a wheel that has different example words on it for you to think through what a plan might look like. And we’ll also put an example of a plan out there so you can see what a plan might look like, as well as their examples on Denise on your website as well.

 

Sue Ryan

Very good point. And I’ll share a story about me with a plan because I am, as Nancy and others will tell you, I’m the queen of notebooks and I’ve got notebooks from my planning for a variety of different things. And one of the things that I created a plan for is the fact that something might happen to me. I was shaving off my own self care and one day that came back to bite me.

 

Denise

Sounds great.

 

Sue Ryan

And I recognized that if something did seriously happen to me, what would other people do? And my emergency plan, one of them was getting insights from other people in case something happened to me. And part of that included I had my dad and my husband registered with emergency services. I had myself registered with emergency services and they knew that I was a caregiver and they knew who to call if something happened to me.

 

Nancy Treaster

That’s important.

 

Denise

Yeah, that’s wonderful, Sue. That’s wonderful.

 

Denise

It could be that you think, it’s not someone in the family, but it’s someone in the community, in my neighborhood, a service provider, someone else that I know. And then just ask if something happens to me, would you be available to help out on a short-term basis for a day or two until we have another plan in place?

 

Nancy Treaster

I like it. So we defined our worry and we created a plan and to the point of getting other people involved, all of this needs to also be communicated. So let’s go to the communication wheel, which for those of you who are just listening is simply a wheel that has lots of different ways you could choose to communicate with people.

 

Denise 

Okay, okay.

 

Denise

I love to think about how am going to communicate my plan? And I also love to give myself permission to communicate it in the way that works for me. And I learned this because of a family caregiver in my community. Her husband had been diagnosed with dementia and she wanted the neighbors to understand what was happening. So she wrote a letter and she wrote the letter to each neighbor and then put the letter in each neighbor’s mailbox.

 

She explained that her husband was recently diagnosed. They might see some changes. And then she made some requests, like, if you’re going to the grocery store, give me a call because I might ask you to pick up something for me. And I thought that was such a great idea. She really thought through what’s possible for me in this moment, meaning that it’s stressful when you receive a diagnosis. It’s hard to figure out what the words are.

 

it might be easier to write it out and then to make the request of what help you might need. And the other thing I like about this too is when we make requests, we worry about the rejection. And because it was a letter that they read not in front of her, she didn’t experience whatever their reaction to it was. And actually the reaction to it was all about support for her and

 

Sue Ryan

Sure.

 

Denise

honoring her request, calling her before they ran errands to see if she needed anything. Everybody was very willing to help and support her.

 

Sue Ryan 

Denise, I think one of the things that’s so powerful about this, and I’ve learned it through my caregiving journeys, is that just like we would want to lean in to help someone else, people really do want to lean in to help us. And they don’t really necessarily know what to do. And rather than feeling like we should be able to do this all on our own, or we don’t want to burden someone else, these give us the way where we can reach out to people and invite them in if they’ve got capacity to, to being able to support us.

 

Nancy Treaster

What I did with the new hospitalization plan is I called all the family members who were expected to do something if my mother-in-law or father-in-law were hospitalized. I got their permission, but I also created a Google Drive that everyone had access to and posted the plans up on the Google Drive. And then I also created a purple folder that was at my house in my home office, at my in-laws house in their home office that had a printed version of the emergency plan because I felt like there needed to be multiple ways people could see it. just another good example of all the different ways you can communicate with your family emergency plan.

 

Denise

And one thing I’ll add too is we can also tell people how to communicate with us. For instance, if I’m working, perhaps there’s a different way to communicate with me than outside of work. And then that way people understand how to reach you and how to reach you in an effective, efficient way.

 

Sue Ryan

Very powerful.

 

Denise 

Nancy, do you mind if we go back up to the family emergency plan? Because I think the Google Drive idea is so good. And one of the suggestions that we offer is you could create different folders based on each of these categories in your shared Google Drive. If you don’t want to do a shared, yeah, if you don’t want to do a shared Google Drive, you could have different folders for each of the categories and then certainly your own categories.

 

Nancy Treaster 

Mm-hmm. Good point, actually.

 

Denise

that you create as well. When I created the shared Google Drive, I had copies of my parents’ Medicare cards and then copies of their medication lists that I shared with siblings so they would know how to access.

 

Sue Ryan 

What I feel really good about Denise, about the power of and possibilities of this is just in this short period of time, we’re talking about so many different ways it could be implemented, so many different ways it can be customized, the number of people who can be involved with it, so that it really is a living, breathing document that’s valuable throughout the entire journey.

 

Denise (27:47.633)

Exactly. Exactly. If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work.

 

Sue Ryan

Okay, that kind of leads us into tip four then, which is the only thing that’s constant is change. So how do we tweak and update our plan so it continues to be valuable and relevant?

 

Denise

I think we look at what I call triggers. And triggers are typically something has changed. It could be something has changed within your carry. It could be that there’s new medications, there’s a decline. It could be that there are second or third diagnoses which change how care is delivered. You might have a change. It could be a change within your job, a change in your availability.

 

There also could be a change within the family. So when I was caring for my parents, my brother died, for instance, and that changed a lot of things. There could be changes with service providers, resources, help. And then it’s also important to know that it’s gonna change when you start palliative care services for your caree and then hospice services for your caree because what happens when there’s a crisis, change, changes.

 

Denise

For instance, when you have hospice services, you’d want everyone to know if there’s some kind of change in a caree, it’s not calling 911, it’s calling hospice services. That’s very important to have in the family emergency plan.

 

Sue Ryan

So it’s so helpful because they don’t know what it is they don’t know. And just like we don’t know the questions to ask when we’re giving them the answers to the questions they don’t know to ask. And we’re continuously giving them the updates and the tweaks and they’re a part of it. They’re going to be studying it. And if they’ve got questions, they can ask when we’re not in the middle of some kind of an emergency. I, for example, when I created the first notebook.

 

Nancy Treaster 

Good point.

 

Sue Ryan

I then scheduled on my calendar, of course I did, that every other month I would review the contents of it and then send updates to people. Now, if something else changed in the interim and it was important, I would go ahead and update it then and I communicated it. Part of the reason I communicated it out to everyone all the time is it continuously reminded them and I would reach out to people and say, you had originally identified you’d have this capacity at these times.

 

Does this still work for you? I wanted people always to have permission to say, this doesn’t work for me anymore, or let’s shift it or whatever. Well, if you tell somebody in January and something changes, but it’s not updated, then when you go to need them and they’re not there, they’ve gone somewhere else, it’s not as valuable. So I literally would have people proactively reach out to me to say, hey, this changed. So it’s us helping them and them helping us, but continuously keeping this a living breathing document.

 

Nancy Treaster

Very true.

 

Denise 

Yeah, I love that. You know, Nancy had said something when we first started, which is when we’re stressed, it can be difficult to think through what do we do next? And I think communicating with everyone involved in the caregiving experience about where we are in caregiving can be so helpful. When my mom was on hospice services, she fell and I freaked out. I usually was the calm one, but for some reason I couldn’t get a good thought in my head. I was so freaked out and it was my dad who said to me, well, we’re not supposed to call 911. We’re supposed to call hospice services. I thought, my gosh, thank goodness for my 90 year old father telling me what to do.

 

Nancy Treaster 

That’s great. That’s great. Well, this has been a great episode, I believe, in terms of impactful information. But Denise, I know we don’t expect everybody to remember all this. So remind our listeners where they should go to get more information.

 

Denise 

Yes, our community is caringourway.com. We do at least one free monthly planning session that you can join. We have a plan that’s available for you to download. And we have a course that’s called the Family Care Manager course. It’s for family caregivers. And part of the course includes creating a family emergency plan. So you could do both. You could join us for a free planning session. You could join the free course and it will help you really think through what’s the plan that works for me. I think that was so valuable about what we talked about today is everyone went through the planning process a little differently, but you created something that you liked that helped you sleep at night. That’s what’s most important.

 

Nancy Treaster (32:40.413)

Absolutely. And so when I summarize, that’s actually my first thought is today we talked about how to calm your worries and how to create a plan that works uniquely for you. And it really is freeing and comforting once you’ve written it down and communicated. So take advantage of that. We actually went through a process. So I’m going to back up to that to remind everybody of the process.

 

But you wanted to say something, Denise before we get to the review?

 

Denise

And I just want everyone to know that when you are thinking through what’s the backup, who’s the backup, please talk to us about it because we’ll help you figure it out.

 

Nancy Treaster

that’s actually a huge part of this is I think leveraging another well ahead that’s actually been through this and created a bunch of plans is certainly way to shortcut getting the right plan the first time. So great great advice. So today we shared four tips on how to calm those worries. First tip one was to name the worry 

Tip two, develop the plan that supports that worry.

Three, communicate the plan. 

And four, don’t forget to revise, tweak, and update the plan on a regular basis. You could use Sue’s example. She put it in her calendar for once every two months. 

 

If you have tips on creating a family emergency plan, we’d love to hear those. Please go to our Facebook page, our Instagram page, and share your tips. That would be great. If you like this podcast, please subscribe to it or follow us and share it with other people as well. Anything we talked about in this podcast that we think you need access to, there will be links in the show notes. So make sure you go to the show notes if you want to have a direct link to the things we talked about here. Creating a family emergency plan and frankly, naming your worries and going through the process of creating a plan and communicating it, like I said, it is a freeing experience. Take advantage of it.

 

Sue Ryan 

Denise, for your investment of time and your great insights for all of us today.

 

Nancy Treaster

I agree. Thank you, Denise.

 

Denise

Yeah, thank you Nancy and Sue, this was really so fabulous.

 

Sue Ryan

This is a great example of we’re all on this journey together.

 

Nancy Treaster 

Yes we are.