Lisa – carer for elderly parents

Lisa lives in rural Victoria. She is in her mid-50’s, works as a teacher and has three children living at home. Over the past 5 years, she has also been the main carer for her ageing parents who live in the same town.

Despite having 4 siblings living close by, Lisa – by default – had somehow taken on the daily care that her parents require and is close to burnout.

Over the years Lisa has told her siblings that she needs more support but, although they told her they would help out, nothing changed.

Lisa decided to try the Gather Group technology as a last resort before she would have to make the decision to place her parents in residential care.

Upon sending a digital invite to her siblings (along with their partners and children) she had a care network of 15 people created within 3 hours. She rostered in all of the help her parents needed for the coming month (care that was normally left to Lisa to manage alone) and uploaded all the important documents in the app (including shopping lists, photos showing where medications were kept, details of the pharmacist and key medical contacts).

When looking at the app, Lisa’s family were shocked to see the amount of care that she was providing. Even though she had been telling them, they had not fully realized the extent of their parents’ care needs.

The five siblings were motivated to came together to share the care load – making sure that Lisa was getting a regular rest from caring so she could focus on her own family and children. The technology sent reminders for upcoming tasks and updated the network when there were new tasks that needed accepting. The network communicated together via the chat function which became a daily update on how the parents were going.

Lisa’s care network has now been going for 2 years. The siblings (and their extended family) have been working together in a coordinated and transparent manner to keep their parents independent and at home through the simple process sharing of responsibility and accountability – while also making sure lines of communication stay open.

Lisa has told Gather Group that without the technology, her parents would have been placed in residential care 2 years ago.