By Susan Pigg Reporter (The Toronto Star)
Pearl Raynes spent decades as a nurse, many of them tending to geriatric patients, so she wasn’t one to be blindsided by old age.
As her health began to fail, requiring more and unexpected visits to doctors’ offices and hospital emergency wards, Raynes, now 83, always came prepared.
In her purse she carried a folded up piece of writing paper. On it was the name of every medication she was taking.
“The one thing she didn’t think to list was her allergies,” to a number of penicillins, says her daughter, Jo-Anne Raynes, now the keeper of the list, along with the medication details of an ailing 79-year-old aunt.
“Most people don’t think of this until they’ve had the experience of going to the emergency room and the triage nurse asks you what medication your mother is taking,” says Raynes, whose mother is now suffering from dementia and other chronic conditions.
Too often that means adult children have to race back to their parent’s home and rifle through medicine cabinets overflowing with pills, herbal remedies, laxatives and pain medications, some of which haven’t been used in years, says Bruce Mahony, director of Home Instead Senior Care Toronto.
“We find the majority of our clients and their adult kids are caught flat-footed or unprepared when an event occurs,” says Mahony, whose agency provides home care to seniors in their homes and in long-term care facilities.
In fact, 43 per cent of adult children expect to start caring for their aging parents within the next three years and one in 10 expect to get that dreaded call in the middle of the night any day now, according to a new survey by Home Instead, with 29 locations caring for thousands of seniors across Canada.
Yet 51 per cent can’t name any medications their parents currently take.
More than half of the almost 300 adult children surveyed, 52 per cent, say their parents have allergies to medications but can’t name them. And more than three-quarters of those surveyed don’t know their parents’ blood type.
That came as no surprise to Mahony who has seen the “turmoil” that can ensue when seniors get unexpectedly sick.
That’s why Home Instead has created a free Senior Emergency Kit and handy fridge magnets, so that all such vital information is within easy reach of adult children or even emergency personnel responding to a crisis.
The portable file is, if nothing else, a talking point for adult children as it provides worksheets for listing everything from parents’ allergies and their symptoms to emergency contact numbers, details of visits to doctors, as well as a list of all the medications the person is taking, their colour, dose and how many are to be taken each day.
Think of the kit as a precursor to long-anticipated e-health records, only in good old paper — or fridge magnet — form.
“When something happens, you need help right away. In the case of my mother’s allergies, I can’t afford to wait two or three days for the reaction (to the wrong penicillin),” says Raynes.
The lists can also be hugely helpful for caregivers charged with caring for ailing parents, says Raynes, who shares her house with her mother and has a caregiver come in while she is at work.
Raynes aged aunt is in a long-term care facility where such details are always kept on computer, but she’s made a point of keeping track of them nonetheless.
The emergency kit also contains a two-page list of “extra resources” — online sites for more information on everything from medication safety to discussing end-of-life issues, coping with caregiver stress and understanding the stages of senior care.
Both the kit, and the information it contains, are available online at www.SeniorEmergencyKit.com .
