Samantha Bates

I think success for me has come from just the pure love of other people, just wanting to help other people. In informal roles that I've had, where I've worked with people who are brand new to an industry and they just didn't know what to do, I realized that with the right help and tools and support, anyone can do anything. That's what I really like about caregivers. We love our families, we'll do anything for them. Most of us are just through trial and error, figuring out what do I need, how do I accomplish it. In corporate worlds and academic environments, there's people, systems, processes, and structures that are already put into place to create success. Caregivers don't have any of that. So we feel like we're kind of like fish out of water. We're not afraid of hard work, but does it really have to be that hard? If I could provide people with the systems, structure, and support, help them find people who will help them, so that they could spend more time being present, loving, and caring for their parents or their children or whoever they're caring for, as opposed to spending time researching and trying to figure out medical, legal, and financial expertise. For me, I love to see people succeed, and I love to see families succeed. There's no reason why it has to be this hard. I can help.

Get certified training. If you are the full-time, one-on-one caregiver, I would say definitely do a certification that helps you understand both the science and the diagnosis, but then also what does care look like at the beginning, what am I going to need to do when I get to middle stages and it's messy, what's the end going to look like. So that they can not only have the skills on a daily basis, but then they're able to future pace, what did my loved one need in 2 years, or in 5 years, or in 10 years. The other two things I suggest is that the caregiver create a baseline plan, like a minimally viable care plan, so if the day gets blown out of the water by emergencies or whatever, you can say to yourself, okay, these are the things that must get done for my loved one, and it's okay. The second thing is to be working with, I say working, but in contact with a peer. I have a caregiving peer that I contact on a daily basis. We text message each other, we call each other. She's caring for her mother-in-law with dementia, and she's literally a sister to me now because we talk to each other every day. We give each other advice, we listen to each other, we help each other, we do whatever we can to support each other.