🌞The July 4th Family Huddle: 6 Questions to Discuss Before Putting Raisins in Your Potato Salad....
Full disclosure: raisins in potato salad are definitely not my thing (but hey, you do you!) That said, delicious food (minus the raisins) is top of mind for me because of next week's July 4th holiday.
🎇 Many of us are packing up, setting out-of-office notifications, and getting ready for a weekend of barbecues, fireworks, and quality time with family. You're planning your food menu, getting out that secret BBQ spice rub, and assigning family members different side dishes. While you're at it, this is also the perfect time to set aside a few minutes to make sure your "healthcare house" is in order….
🌴 Welcome to the Summer Sandbox, a new series from #TheFamilyHealthcarePlaybook focused on just that: helping you get your family's "healthcare house" in order. In tech, we use a "sandbox" to safely test new software and agentic AI tools before deploying them. Believe it or not, your family healthcare planning shouldn't be any different. Before you introduce new digital tools or health tech into your family's healthcare lineup, you first need a safe space to set up, and more importantly, talk about the human stuff.
🌭 Holiday family gatherings are the perfect time for this: you're all together, and you hopefully have a bit of downtime. So next week, while you're enjoying July 4th, take a quick 20-minute "family huddle" with your partner, siblings, parents, or grandparents to tick through a few basics. Here are 6 questions to help you get started:
✅ Do we have every family member's updated contact info? Current cell phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses. Have we deleted any old contact info?
✅ What's the name and contact info of our primary care provider? Does everyone in the family know who that is? And do we know which doctors are our backups if our primary is unavailable?
✅ Do we all have current copies of our health insurance cards? Physical and digital?
✅ Do we know where our family's nearest hospital, ER, and urgent care are? And are they in-network for our specific insurance?
✅ Do we have family Advance Directives for Healthcare and Finances? If yes, do we know where the physical or digital copies are located? If not, do we have the name of an estate planning lawyer who can help us pull these together?
✅ Who's on our immediate family emergency response team? Which 2–3 specific people in our family are we calling first in a family medical emergency? Do those family members know that? And are they okay with (comfortable) with having that role?
Start with these 6 questions, and if you don’t know the answers, don’t stress! Just create a task or a reminder in your calendar to take care of it the following week. Or better yet, assign each family member a different task and plan a quick follow-on family meetup or FaceTime to discuss it.
📚 I built #TheFamilyHealthcarePlaybook to help accidental caregivers like me get their families' "healthcare house" in order. If you need help getting started, check out the link in the comments below to purchase your copy.
🕶️ Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing more advice, tips, and best practices as part of our Summer Sandbox series to help you get your family’s "healthcare house" in order. Stay tuned for more!
#TheFamilyHealthcarePlaybook #AccidentalCaregiver #FamilyCaregivers #FamilyCaregiving #Caregiving #SandwichGeneration