Senior Caregiving With Multiple Family Members

If I mention group projects, you might think back to high school or college when you worked with five of your peers on a class project that may have been disorganized. When multiple family members act as caregivers, the process can feel like a chaotic group project with many moving parts and varying degrees of involvement.

Managing senior care with multiple family members can be stressful, frustrating, and often involves one person taking on the brunt of the work. For those who are caregiving with multiple caregivers, it’s important to learn what works best for you and your family.

Here at Avanlee Care, we’re well-acquainted with the intricacies of caregiving. I have a large family, with several people who want to be involved in caring for my grandmother. Being across the country, I want to stay connected with her in a way where she feels I’m present and she’s not lonely. Here are some of the struggles we overcame in managing her care with multiple family members.

Best Ways to Coordinate Care With Multiple Caregivers

Managing care with multiple family caregivers may seem like a daunting logistical task, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a few ways to get started organizing your family to simplify care for your loved one.

Delegating care and organizing your communication channels can help reduce some of the pain points associated with caregiving, and help mitigate some of the challenges that multiple caregivers may bring.

Let’s go over some helpful ways to work with multiple caregivers.

Clear, consistent communication among your senior’s caregivers

Communication is critical for effective caregiving and can get complex with multiple caregivers. Miscommunication is a common frustration among caregivers, with the overwhelming set of needs, like:

• Managing your senior’s medications
• Remembering important appointments
• Monitoring your loved one’s health
• Managing schedules (both for caregivers and care receivers!
• Simple tasks like shopping for groceries

Questions such as, “Who is handling what, when?” or, “Whose job is this?” might come up frequently.

Reduce miscommunication issues by clarifying and sharing caregiving roles, expectations, schedules, and tasks. Staying organized as a caregiving team is another critical component of streamlining care with multiple caregivers. Regular, clear communication will help prevent frustration later down the road.

Managing schedules for both caregivers and seniors

The average family caregiver spends 20 hours each week caring for their loved one. And that’s often on top of their own job, family and other responsibilities. Between your work schedule and managing meetings, kids, appointments, and a personal life, it can feel overwhelming to coordinate your loved one’s care while also considering the schedules of multiple caregivers.

Caregiving for my grandma was burying my mom and her sister because it was so time-consuming, and they had their own 9-5 jobs and families to take care of. Something needed to change to make it sustainable.

Most family members who provide care for seniors take on multiple tasks, managing the details of medications and medication schedules, buying groceries, and handling the other minutia associated with caregiving. It can get more complex when you add additional people into that mix, but it doesn’t have to be.

How to organize care among multiple family caregivers:

• Learn and use time management tips to help you stay on top of each detail associated with caregiving.
• Create a caregiving calendar and assign specific roles to each person to organize the distribution of tasks. Delegating roles and tasks can help family members share caregiving responsibility equitably, based on their own workloads.
• You can also make a caregiving “chore chart” or spreadsheet-based on who is available for what task—(bathing, groceries, house cleaning, medication management, driving to doctor appointments, etc.—and allocate tasks based on availability.

If caregivers live in different areas of the country, delegating will obviously not work for everyone, but family members can provide other means of support, such as emotional and financial help.

In my family, my mom and her sister are primarily the first point of contact with my grandma. They delegate and assign tasks as needed.

Coordinate Multiple Caregivers Using Avanalee

Caregiving apps like Avanlee can help mitigate fractured communication, disorganized schedules, and burnout that can come with managing multiple caregivers. We’ve taken the most important aspects of care and centralized them into one easy-to-use platform for family caregivers to remotely care for an aging parent. It can also help solve loneliness and distance, and most importantly: it’s built for a senior using technology.

Watching the physical and emotional stress my mother and aunts experienced as caregivers for my grandma and being part of that care team was a driver for why I created Avanlee.

My mother, aunts, and uncles find the Avanlee app extremely helpful while they manage my grandma’s care. All of my grandma’s caregivers—primarily the adult children—use it to coordinate care tasks, keep track of medications, and stay up-to-date on doctor appointments. My grandma loves that she has a way to stay connected with all of her grandkids, and most importantly—it’s easy for her to use.

Multiple Caregivers Can Be Successful With the Right Tools

With any caregiving journey—especially one that involves multiple caretakers—there will be a period of figuring out what works best for you and your family. That plan might need a few adjustments as you work out the right system and tools for you and your family members.

We’re excited about the next phase of where Avanlee is going, and we’re excited to help provide family caregivers the ability to get senior groceries and medications delivered remotely through our app so seniors can stay healthy and happy at home.