An Important Message Regarding Your Rights

This message and the story that goes with it is a cautionary tale about Health Care "rights" in general and the needs of our elderly kin in particular. It actually reads ""An Important Message Regarding Your Medicare Rights." The discovery of this message came when my father was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia over a year ago, (or rather, a few weeks later.) One would hope that importance would be attributed to the knowing an individual themselves upon a hospital admission, rather than having a systemic eye assessing them as another stereotypical elder.

However, if the person has the term "dementia" in their chart, you can't necessarily count on staff noticing or making differentiations regarding how confused the person actually is, or how oriented they are normally. They may just assume that disorientation in the hospital may be the way the person is, when it actually can be a sign of something more serious. This prejudice may especially be true if the person is coming from a nursing home, and has the aforementioned label in their paperwork.

If you are like me, you may be trying to be a caregiver from afar - helping your elderly relative from another state. And if you are also like me, in order to preserve your own life and job, there may come a time after repeated hospitalizations, that you may have to choose depending upon circumstances whether to come immediately each time your relative goes to the hospital.

The ideal situation would be that there would be someone there who could be a support, and yes be a watchdog, every step of the way, particularly if your relative has memory problems. (My father has short term memory problems but can become very confused with a hospitalization.)

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An Important Message Regarding Your Rights