May is National Aging Life Care Month and Springpoint at Home wants to help raise awareness about our Aging Life Care Advisor™/Care Manager team and their dedication to a holistic, client-centered approach to caring for older adults.

The path to becoming an Aging Life Care Advisor™ is as diverse as the individuals who pursue this career. It requires a Master level degree and many in this field hold a Master of Social Work (MSW), Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) or a Master of Science in Gerontology (MSG). No matter the degree, having membership in the Aging Life Care Association (ALCA) assures family members that the person they have hired is a highly qualified professional, like our newest Aging Life Care Advisor™/Care Manager team member, Bettyann Cramer-Manchin.

Bettyann has a wide breadth of experience in a variety of healthcare settings, including long-term care, subacute care, acute rehabilitation and brain injury rehabilitation centers. Her path to care management started earlier in her career, even though she did not realize it at the time.

Bettyann received a Master of Arts in Urban Bioethics with a focus on End-of-Life Care from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. Her thesis focused on quality at end-of-life and end-of-life issues, topics which she is passionate about. Her focus on end-of-life is a natural outgrowth of her Bachelor of Science in Recreation and Leisure from Temple. As a Certified Therapeutic Recreation Specialist, she believes that people should live the best life they can, whether they are 20 and live to 90 or are 85 and live to 90.

As a Recreation Therapist who focuses on quality of life, it means helping a client to adapt or finding the right technology that allows them to live their best life where they are right now. Certainly, living your best life requires a focus on health and wellness, but that should not be the only focus. It is too easy for the leisure activities that make someone feel whole again to take a back seat to medical challenges. Finding ways to adapt or bring leisure back into someone’s life makes a difference in their mental and emotional health.

Taking a holistic look at a client’s entire life helps them to plan for the energy they have at this point in their life. To do this, Bettyann uses the ‘Spoon Theory’ which was developed in 2003 by writer Christine Miserando to explain how Lupus impacts her ability to perform daily tasks. For someone to live their best life, it helps to recognize how much energy you have for each day. Only then can you plan your day. If at this stage in your life you have five spoons and today just getting dressed takes four spoons, you only have one left for the day. The question becomes how will you use that one spoon? Will you go to the doctor, the grocery store or visit with a friend?

Our Springpoint at Home Aging Life Care Advisor™/Care Manager can help your older adult preserve a spoon for the day. For example, by finding resources like a home health aide to assist them. With each spoon we preserve, we help our client have the best life they can right now, knowing that it looks different for each person on different days and points in their life.

After 32 years in healthcare and her understanding of what it takes to live your best life, Bettyann believes that joining Springpoint at Home brings her career full circle.

To learn more about Springpoint at Home, please call us at 844-724-1777 or visit our website at https://springpointathome.org/