Why We Sit in Rooms Like This One

This week we are in Austell, at a senior alliance meeting, sitting around a table with other people who work with older adults in this part of Georgia.

There is no sales pitch in it for us. Nobody at that table is going to hire a home care agency.

So why go?

Because the honest answer to "who should we call?" is almost never one company.

A family rings us because their mother is not safe on the stairs. Ten minutes into the conversation, the real list turns out to be longer: a benefits application nobody has filed, a bathroom with no grab rails, a car that should not be on the road any more, and a daughter in Savannah who has not slept properly in a month.

We can help with one of those. Sometimes two.

The rest belong to somebody else — a case manager, the Area Agency on Aging, an occupational therapist, a lawyer who does elder law properly, the senior centre three miles away running the programme nobody knew existed.

You cannot send a family somewhere useful if you do not know who is out there. And you do not learn that from a website.

What being in the room actually gets you

You find out which programmes have a waiting list this month, rather than last year. You learn which discharge planner returns calls and which one does not. You hear that the transport service everyone recommends quietly stopped covering a county in June, which is the kind of thing that takes a family three phone calls and a wasted morning to discover on their own.

You also get asked hard questions by people who already know the answers. That is a good thing to be subjected to regularly.

The half nobody talks about

Being part of a community is not only about what you take out of it. It is about being somebody other providers can send a family to without worrying afterwards.

That reputation is not built by advertising. It is built by turning up, saying plainly what you can and cannot do, and then doing what you said you would.

We have said no to referrals that were not right for us. Every one of those was a better outcome for the family and, in the long run, for us.

Austell, and Cobb County

Cobb is one of the twenty Georgia counties we serve. We have clients there and caregivers who live there. Showing up locally is not a courtesy — it is the work.

If you work with older adults anywhere in our service area and we have not met yet, we would like to. Come and find us, or call the office.

(404) 375-7808