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Armed with their professional and personal understanding of seniors’ nuanced needs, Karen Kirby and Susan Kelsey started Assistance Plus, a geriatric care management practice that specializes in helping relatives who live far away take care of their elderly loved ones.
Kelsey isn’t a senior citizen, but she has seen the challenges that come with aging. Her more than 30-year career in the health care field has included serving as a speech pathologist for adults with neurological disorders such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease, as well several years working in an assisted living facility. In addition, Kelsey has a doctoral degree in gerontology from the University of South Carolina and is a certified geriatric care manager.
Her friend and business partner, Karen Kirby, a social worker, also has about three decades of heath care work under her belt. She specializes in the geriatric field and has also worked with assisted living facilities, in addition to running support groups for the families of people with Alzheimer’s.
Both Kirby and Kelsey also have dealt with their own parents growing older.
“We both live at a distance from our parents, and we’ve had many issues trying to coordinate their health care,” said Kelsey, a 10-year resident of Hilton Head Island who grew up in New York City and taught special education before she became a speech pathologist. “We know what the problems are.”
Families — most often the adult children of seniors — hire Assistance Plus to take care of day-to-day tasks and to ensure their older relatives are getting proper medical care.
The day-to-day tasks include setting up utility services or paying bills. Kirby and Kelsey’s services also include making regular visits to clients’ homes to check on them, accompanying them to doctors’ appointments, making referrals and recommendations for nursing homes or assisted living facilities, creating nutrition plans, and even helping arrange moves. “It’s assistance, plus a lot of extra compassion, care and time,” Kelsey said.
She added that one of the most important things Assistance Plus does is stay in contact with clients’ families, especially those who live out of town or are away on vacation but are tasked with watching over an older relative. “It gives (family members) peace of mind to know there’s somebody they can call,” she said. “They know we’ll be there; they have somebody they can rely on.”
It’s a tough job, especially because Kelsey and Kirby, who have about 20 clients (ranging from age 80 to older than 100) spread across Beaufort County, are the business’s only employees, and they have to make sure that at least one of them is on-call for emergencies 24/7. That requires extreme dedication, as well as a lot of understanding from their husbands.
But both entrepreneurs said that what keeps them going is their passion for what they do — along with the strong friendships they forge.
“It’s about helping people and forming trusting relationships,” said Kirby, who grew up in Ohio and moved to Hilton Head Island about 13 years ago. “You become their surrogate children in a way, and I think most of our clients come to view us as a gift.”
Added Kelsey, “Our friendships with the older adults that we work with are most gratifying — knowing that we make a difference in the quality of their lives, that we can avert some unnecessary complications that could arise without our oversight, and that we can make their lives a little easier by giving them support without taking away independence unnecessarily.”
For more information on Assistance Plus, call 363-5412.
