Let’s Talk About What Matters: Healthy Aging
Image courtesy of Samaritan.
BY SARA PAGLIARO, DO | Chief Medical Officer, Samaritan
Healthy aging is more than drinking green smoothies, logging daily steps, and adding birthday celebrations. It’s knowing who to trust when life throws curveballs and where to go if you need help.
September marks Healthy Aging® Month – a time to celebrate the positive aspects of growing older and recognize the value of aging well.
Healthy living includes preparing for future needs, reflecting on past experiences, and living your best life now. Getting the physical, emotional, spiritual, and social care and support you need today matters, whether you’re 55 and feeling vibrant, or 85 and facing complex health issues.
Honoring the Act of Aging
Samaritan’s team has walked beside individuals and families through life’s most tender aging moments. The personalized, comprehensive care we provide is rooted in our desire to serve the community, which we’ve proudly done for 45 years. During this time, we’ve become one of the New Jersey’s leading providers of primary care at home, palliative medicine, hospice care, grief support, advanced illness care, education, and advocacy.
The Wisdom of Choice By proactively making and living your choices through your aging transitions – especially when serious illness is involved – you are more likely to age with dignity, comfort, and joy. It’s important that you surround yourself with a care team committed to helping you navigate your personal path through those transitions. Your care matters, and your voice in choosing that care is essential.
What Is Care Navigation?
Care navigation is a process in which your care team provides you with the information you need to understand your diagnosis and your care choices. Healthcare is often confusing and overwhelming. Care navigation is designed to help you access the right care at the right time to support your goals and wishes.
At Samaritan, our Samaritan Care Pathways program delivers person-centered care that focuses on:
* Honoring your goals
* Helping you through each step of a serious illness journey
* Providing you with advanced clinical expertise and extraordinary compassion at every stage
The team of highly skilled providers includes fellowship-trained and board-certified hospice and palliative care physicians and nurses, nurse navigators, and social workers, all committed to honoring the goals and wishes of each patient.
Your ideal care team will help you understand options, coordinate care, and ensure healthcare services align with your desires and needs. They will assist you in making long-term care planning decisions while focusing on your daily physical and psychosocial well-being.
Why does Care Navigation Matter?
You deserve to live well through every life stage. Routine aspects of aging can be challenging enough that you might ask friends or family for assistance: difficulty driving because of decreased vision, managing multiple medications, or being steady enough on your feet to fix your own meals. Living with diagnoses including heart failure, kidney disease, COPD, dementia, cancer, and other serious illnesses increases these challenges and can dramatically impact your quality of life.
Having the support of a care team that helps you understand, coordinate, and choose your care options can make all the difference in helping you live your best life every day.
Coordinating Care, Stage by Stage
To better understand the role care coordination plays in serious illnesses, let’s look at Advanced Cardiac Care as an example.
Knowing what to expect if you have cardiac disease is vital in helping you make the best decisions about your care, and in asking and planning for the help you need. When your care team asks about your goals of care, they want to understand what is important and meaningful to you. That information allows them to provide the care you need and treat your symptoms at every step of your cardiac care – starting as early as the time of diagnosis.
In Advanced Cardiac Care, palliative medicine relieves heart failure symptoms, including shortness of breath, weakness, fatigue, and swelling with treatments including medication, therapies, counseling, and other supports. These treatments, along with lifestyle changes you make, can help you manage symptoms of, live better with, and delay progression of heart failure. Even in the final stages of CHF, coordinated care can keep you comfortable and help you enjoy quality time with loved ones.
Your Path to Aging Well Starts with Planning Ahead
Proactively planning and communicating your unique aging goals helps you and your family plan for potential health emergencies and make treatment decisions in advance of, instead of during a crisis. There’s strength in seeking guidance and beauty in aging with intention.
For resources to help you plan your aging journey, visit samaritannj.org or call us at (856) 596-1600 to learn more about accessing the care you need and deserve.
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