By Cecily O’Connor
RedwoodAge.com 

The moment Valerie Radloff discovered her 84-year-old father’s personal care assistant was thinking of leaving, she was unnerved.

“I hate it,” said the 52-year-old as she pondered the prospect of finding another assistant to help her father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and dementia.

Mary Botelle, who oversees QuickMatch

As caregivers, many of Ms. Radloff’s contemporaries are rattled by the process of seeking someone to tend to their aging parents. There are myriad options, but weeding through those choices is not easy. However, a growing number of online resources are making the task more manageable.

Ms. Radloff’s interest in locating reliable care is heightened by the fact that she is a registered nurse, and thus, intimately familiar with her father’s health needs. This time around, the San Rafael, Calif., resident is hoping to find a male assistant to support her dad, who lives nearby with her brother. In addition to word-of-mouth references, she plans to search an online database called QuickMatch.

"QuickMatch is a point of entry not only for care, but for any questions related to seniors," said Mary Botelle, who coordinates the QuickMatch database of personal care attendants at the Marin Center for Independent Living.

QuickMatch is “sort of like Match.com” for family caregivers seeking eldercare providers, said Mara Margolis, deputy director at the Marin Center for Independent Living, which introduced the free database one year ago.

Search parameters such as desired pay rate, location and health experience enable boomers to find personal assistants that meet their aging parents’ needs. QuickMatch also carries assistants’ resumes and an audio link to hear first-hand about the assistant’s experience and approach.

The service is “extremely accessible, and (users) are getting good people that are screened,” Ms. Margolis said. Only one out of 10 personal care assistants that are screened make it into the database, she added.

Personal assistants in the database charge anywhere between $12 and $20 an hour, based on a RedwoodAge.com scan of resumes. Ms. Radloff, who pays her father’s personal assistant $17 an hour, said she relies on a payroll service to ease the administrative burden of Social Security payments.

It’s important to note, however, that the cost of care will vary nationally, depending on location and scope of services needed, said Rita Widergren, a public health nurse and director of Project Independence, a Marin County imitative that matches volunteers with “frail or isolated” individuals coming out of the hospital. Overall, hourly rates tend to be higher in Marin County than in other U.S. regions, she said.

National Need
There are several other online referral services that link families to eldercare providers on a national basis.  One of them is Ashland, Maine-based ElderCarelink, whose network includes U.S. assisted living facilities, home care services, adult daycare and nursing homes. After completing a “needs” survey, the company’s website promises to send families an e-mail listing care providers in their area that match specific requirements.

In addition, there’s Eldercare Locator, a service from the U.S. Administration on Aging. It connects older Americans and their caregivers with sources of information on senior services.

Even with all of these resources, the trick is achieving balance. Overall, caregiving can have a significant impact on baby boomers’ life, from a social, health and emotional perspective, according to a survey of 700 caregivers who had recently used the ElderCarelink service. When it comes to caring for an aging parent, about 69 percent said they felt overwhelmed; another 62 percent indicated they wanted more support from other family members.

One approach to ease some of that stress is to not rush into anything. Get a feel for the personal care assistant to be sure they truly understand the aging parent’s needs, Ms. Widergren advised. For example, if duties such as laundry and keeping the home clean are a priority, make sure the caregiver is comfortable with those tasks.

After finding someone with whom you feed “simpatico,” set up a contract that outlines expectations on both ends as it relates to pay, schedule and duties, she added. “You don’t want someone who’s coming in and creating anxiety.”