About Caregiver Support and Resources, LLC
What Does a Patient Advocate Do?
Caregiver Support & Resources, LLC specializes in patient advocacy, life-care planning, and Medicaid & VA planning for elders, as well as persons living with dementia, other terminal illnesses and disabilities. Knowledge is power! We are your one-stop shop for what you need to know about elder care and how to build and enact a plan for a life worth living.
Maureen Rulison, CDMCP, is a Board-certified Patient Advocate in the State of Florida.
Her services to clients in the Tampa Bay, Clearwater and St. Petersburg, FL areas prepare families for care needs. She also coordinates a variety of resources that may be needed as a loved one enters home care, assisted living and nursing facilities, and end-of-life care.
Decisions are never easy.
Maureen provides a personal, caring and compassionate touch to each step of the care-partner journey. Why? Because she’s a care partner herself. With her life partner/care partner, Brian LeBlanc, who lives with Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, Maureen has built their own life-care plans to account for any need along their journey together. How’s that for experience?
Patient Advocacy
Our Board-certified Patient Advocacy in the State of Florida works directly with clients to:
- Help understanding of the financial impact of decisions including Medicaid and VA Aid & Attendance planning with asset protection.
- Build care-partner teams including family and friends who can help clients follow treatments and medications, physical therapy, and nutritional recommendations. We create unique teams with loved ones and professionals who are experts in their field.
- Help navigate through complex health care systems. We assist clients to coordinate care among many clinicians, settings and affiliated providers.
- Empower our clients to ask questions by coaching which questions to ask of whom.
- Ensure clients understand treatment options and who can deliver them (and to seek second and third opinions, when appropriate).
- Coordinate and attend appointments with medical providers and other support services.
- Address any safety concerns during transportation, doctor visits, home care, assisted care and daily life.
- Assist understanding and coordination of discharge summaries.
- Teach clients to use an organization technique (ex. – a planner, phone app, or 3-ring binder). We help clients to keep a file of all the current diagnoses and treatments when seeing multiple doctors, and to report these to each provider so they are aware of current, past or upcoming treatments.Â
- Ensure all consents are complete so providers have permission to communicate with each other and that the advocate can communicate on the client’s behalf, if necessary.
- Communicate with the primary care physician what happens at each appointment with specialists, therapists, etc., as well as to create a list of all medications for each visit.
- Ask for pharmacists to review medications for interactions any time a new medication is added or changed.
- Learn if the health organization offers any case-management or care-coordination services that can help. (If within the same system, appointments could be coordinated so that the client can go to one appointment after another in the same place.)
- Plan care transitions to ensure continuity of care, clarify the current state of the patient’s health and capabilities, and review medications when discharging (especially to a rehab facility or nursing home).
- Empower clients by providing them with choices about transition strategies.
- Develop straightforward plans for managing care in new settings.
- Ensure care partners and other support persons receive the education they need to be successful.
- Make arrangements to obtain needed medical equipment.
- Find needed in-home supportive care.
- Find and retain relevant community agencies and professionals.