Sudbury Resident Helps Ease Caregiver Stress

Perhaps one of the most difficult and daunting decisions adult children of elderly parents face is when to seek help outside the circle of immediate family, recognizing that they can no longer “do it all” in providing the myriad of necessary care giving services for elderly family members.

Long Term Solutions, a Natick-based company co-founded by Sudbury resident Noreen Guanci, is a national company that provides elder care management services, a field of expertise virtually non-existent approximately 15 years ago. Nowadays, these types of businesses are more common, but the resources and services offered – and the manner in which the availability of the resources and services is presented to prospective clients – is the key successful marketing of this type of business.

“The whole social dynamic of the family has changed,” said Guanci. “People are living longer but are not necessarily healthier. During their later years, this group of people finds they can’t always be independent like they had been and they need assistance at home. The elderly parents can no longer depend on their children at home because people move around, and you have a geographical separation of parents from children.

"And these elderly people prefer to stay in their own homes.”

Guanci said that historically, females have always been the caregivers in the home and many female members of families with elderly parents “work” for their parents in the respect that the female offspring is the caregiver and not an outsider.

"These situations have created a need for these types of services,” Guanci said.

Guanci’s company provides services that can help ease the stress, ease the worry of adult children and provide some measure of peace of mind for all parties involved. Nurses are sent to the homes of prospective clients and provide on-the-spot evaluations to determine what specific types of elder care services are needed. There is no “umbrella” of services – clients’ needs are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The biggest challenge, Guanci noted, is convincing the elderly parents of adult children to accept outside assistance. She stated that the adult children are more amenable to receiving outside help, stating, “Children worry when Mom or Dad are living in Florida and they don’t have time to go down there.”

Guanci is no stranger to challenges – or stress. Her own mother died in 1997 and prior to her death, Guanci found herself a part of the “sandwich generation,” a term used to define an adult child of elderly parents who is not only the parents’ caregiver, but simultaneously parenting a young child or children. Guanci has three children, and back then found herself juggling – and struggling – to care of her ailing mother and being a mother herself to her own children.

“My mom had health issues as she aged, and my kids were young at the time. It was really tough,” she said. “I was going to doctors appointments with my mother and having my own kids, it was at that stage where there were after school activities and I was trying to be there for everyone.”

Guanci revealed how her own guilt would surface when she couldn’t make it to one of her children’s sporting events because she was spending time caring for her mother. And then it would be vice-versa. “There was guilt everywhere,” she candidly added.

Guanci’s brother provided great support in caring for their mother, including an in-law apartment. But, Guanci shared that her mother had a lot of cardiac issues and lost a leg. And after her father died, her mother was alone for two years and Guanci unabashedly admitted the difficulties she experienced being both caregiver and mother.

“Caregiver stress is a huge concern among persons who care for elderly family members,” she said.

In 1999, two years after her mother died, Guanci and her business partner, Anne Harrington, both nurses, founded Long Term Solutions, and their “vision” of providing high quality elder care management to the senior citizen population has enabled many people shed their own caregiver stress – and guilt – by accepting the assistance of experienced caregivers who gently take the reigns from family members and become important facets in the quality of life for many elderly persons.

Long Term Solutions was named by Inc. Magazine as one of 5,000 most fastest-growing companies in America in 2010, and was included in a list of companies by the Women Presidents’ Organization as one of the fastest-growing women-owned companies in the United States.

Guanci stated that her company employs 10 Sudbury residents who are mostly part of the administrative staff, and it recently hired Sandra King, another Sudbury resident, to be its senior vice president of sales and marketing.

Years of experience in the health care field, as well as her advanced education, have given Guanci the perfect foundation upon which to build her successful business. While she cherished the years she spent as a nurse, she stated she was very intrigued with the management part of health care, particularly in an entrepreneurial setting.

“This service is so easy to sell,” Guanci said. “When you get into a room, someone always has a story. It gets very personal.”

Many senior citizens, while not medically sick, are afflicted with chronic conditions that interfere with their ability to properly care for themselves. Guanci states people in this group are just weak enough that they cannot bathe themselves, toilet themselves, or do the basic activities of day-to-day living. These groups need someone to come in and help them. And this is where Long Term Solutions steps in.

“We will go in and do an evaluation, tap into community resources,” she said. “We may find that an elderly woman needs a home health aide to come in and help her bathe. Above and beyond that, there may be a community center, a Meals on Wheels organization or even a religious affiliation that offers volunteer services – people who will come in and visit with her, anything that will help her to sort of “thrive” at home.”

Or, Guanci stated, another situation in which her company would offer its management services is if someone were to suffer a fall and an injury that required rehabilitation, the injury may still limit that person’s mobility and the ability to perform routine chores and personal care. Her company sends in a nurse to do a comprehensive assessment and determine the needed services to help this person continue with a positive quality of life.

But what makes Long Term Solutions stand out against other types of businesses in the same field?

“We like to say that it’s the culture here – it’s a very sort of nurturing culture in the company and it doesn’t hurt that we have many nurses here to take care of each other,” said Guanci. “We love diversity here, too. We have a vision-impaired nurse and a guide dog here that is very special to us.

“We’ve reached out to some of the local schools and offered internships to some of their special-needs students who have worked here during summers. We are working on forming a committee right now on how we can give back more to the community. We are looking at organizations such as Alzheimer’s Association. We have a lot of clients who have Alzheimer’s disease and we want to focus some of our attention on volunteering."

Guanci has found that people do want to volunteer to help in any way they can with her organization. She states that the quality of her company’s services is meshed in pride, and everyone in her company is very proud of what they do. The company has a very low turnover, according to Guanci.

Long Term Solutions is expanding into the corporate world with a program called WeCare+ which addresses the needs of a greater audience.

“We started exploring other places where we could take our services,” said Guanci. “One of those focuses was looking at companies. For instance, if an employee works for a company and that employee has a mom or a dad living in Florida or far away from the employee, the employee has stress and worry and is not productive because of this stress and worry over the parents.

“We get a solution in place so that everyone comes out a winner,” she said. “The problem will be solved, and for the employer, it will have more productive employees. Ultimately, we provide the third-party consultation to companies by stating to them that this is what we think you need. This is key. There is no conflict of interest.”