The kinds of help that exist

Why this list exists

Senior Support Navigation runs into the same wall every time: a family knows what the problem is and has no idea what category of help it falls into. They know their mother cannot get to dialysis. They do not know that non-emergency medical transportation is a thing with a name, that it is often free, and that the office that arranges it is usually one phone call away.

You cannot ask for something you have never heard of. So before the plan, the vocabulary.

The categories

• Getting there: what happens when driving stops, and how people get to appointments, shops and each other.
• Eating: delivered meals, community meals, and the food benefit that most eligible older adults never claim.
• Staying at home: help with the tasks that decide whether home stays workable.
• Respite: time off for the person doing the caring, which is the category families discover last and need earliest.
• Paying for it: how care is actually funded, and the assumption that costs families the most money.
• Support for the caregiver: the help that exists for the family member, not the older adult.

What these pages will not do

They will not tell you that you qualify for something. Eligibility depends on your state, your county, your income, your insurance, your veteran status and frequently on a waiting list, and any page that tells a national audience what they qualify for is guessing. A wrong answer about Medicaid costs a family real money.

What these pages do is name the thing, describe how it usually works, and tell you who to ask. The free check is where it gets specific to your situation, and where unknown is recorded as unknown rather than as no.

None of this is medical advice, and none of it replaces the professionals involved in someone's care.