Successful Aging and Exercising the Mind, Body and Spirit
Parmly LifePointes, an Ecumen community in Chisago City, Minnesota, is embarking on a very cool new journey built upon successful aging.
Their new Vitalize! Wellness Centre, opening this fall , will have all the bells and whistles … TechnoGym weights and TechnoGym aerobic fitness equipment that digitally measure one’s personal progress, a warm-water lap pool, a warm water pool with a treadmill, herbal teas and great food, exercise rooms, massage, plus classrooms for lifelong learning that helps people explore, personalize and enhance dimensions of successful aging. Oh, don’t let me forget the feng shui garden.
Patricia Montgomery, is the director of Vitalize!. A former college swimmer and corporate wellness director, Patricia, who is about to conclude her masters degree in holistic health at the College of St. Catherine, knows all about exercise of the physical type, but what she and the folks at Parmly LifePointes are focused on goes far, far beyond. As they look at wellness, they are going to be empowering people to empower themselves and exercise not just the physical parts of their being, but also the intellectual, vocational, social, spiritual and emotional parts.Vitalize! will be the place where a 25-year-old certified nursing assistant (what a great asset this will be for Parmly employees) and an 85-year-old who might have a chronic condition and lives in assisted living or the nursing home, go to take greater control of their life and how they travel through it.Vitalize! also will be open to the public. This isn’t Ballys or Lifetime Fitness, though. This is a completely different animal built on taking control of your own wellness no matter your age or your physical ability. And it’s built on the premise that aging is all about living …even at the end of life.
Seniors, Baby Boomers and Work
Quick note, the most e-mailed story of the last two days on The New York Times web site was the story we talked about yesterday, where people, nonprofits and others are working to enable seniors to stay in their neighborhoods and age in community. Independence strikes a chord.How Long Are You Going to Work? Chances are you’re reading this from work. Will you be working into your 70s, 80s, 90s … Maybe you’ll be like Waldo McBurney … Recently declared America’s oldest worker, he’s a 104-year-old beekeeper in Kansas.When we asked baby boomers about their future work plans in the Ecumen Age Wave Study, 'retirement' isn’t really in their vocabulary. Most plan to continue working. But there’s an important caveat. A bunch of them said they’re going to be switching jobs and doing something they enjoy. Many said pay is important, but just as important were social connections and mental engagement.Senior Workforce Today About 6.4 percent of Americans 75 or older, or slightly more than 1 million, were working last year. That’s up from 4.7 percent, or 634,000, a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.About 3.4 percent of Americans 80 or older, or 318,000, were in the work force last year, up from 2.7 percent or 188,000 a decade earlier, officials said.That’s only going to grow and change the workplace and how people work. For example, could companies keep talent and people, and provide a flexible work schedule in exchange for health benefits rather than a full salary? Those are the types of questions Ecumen and other companies are asking as we enter this new world where there will be more seniors and fewer young people. Are there any ideas you have or have seen elsewhere?
Successful Aging in Place, Successful Aging in Community
Here’s a movement that is quickly picking up speed and is only going to get more fervent as the age wave rises - the desire to package products and services that enable a person to age in place (More people are calling it aging in community' because they see themselves as being connected to the larger community, not just one place.).Ecumen leader Kathryn Roberts wrote about this in last week’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. Here you can access her article. Today the New York Times has an article about a group of people it says is part of a movement to make neighborhoods comfortable places to grow old, both for elderly men and women in need of help and for baby boomers anticipating the future.When you read this, one can see an opportunity for a number of America’s nursing homes and assisted living communities to diversify their offerings, create partnerships and to deliver their expertise outside of bricks and mortar. What do you think? Have you heard of others doing this?
Delivering Eldercare Where and How the Customer Wants it
Two-thirds of baby boomers told us in our Age Wave study us that their ideal situation if they need care as seniors is to have it at home with a mix of family caregivers and professional caregivers. Look below at the 'language' HouseWorks uses. It is all customer-focused. HouseWorks is a Massachusetts-based home care company that has set out to completely differentiate itself from others in their marketplace. They highlight that they provide the best home care services, whereever 'home' is, including one’s condo, single-family home, assisted living community, or nursing home. I’ve highlighted a few areas below from the 'about us' section in their website where they use language differently than most home care organizations and further differentiate HouseWorks for their customers. From the beginning, HouseWorks was meant to be a different kind of private-pay home care company €” more flexible, more reliable, and more responsive than any of its predecessors.A better home care solution for seniors and their familiesFounded in 1998, HouseWorks is a local company dedicated to helping seniors live independently, no matter how challenging their circumstances. Today, HouseWorks is fulfilling its mission by providing the most responsive and reliable home care services in Eastern Massachusetts.HouseWorks' fundamental innovation has been its entrepreneurial approach to service delivery, a customer-driven approach that returns a sense of control to adult children and their elderly parents. Rather than telling customers what they can or should have, HouseWorks listens to what they want and bends over backward to meet their needs. HouseWorks' professional staff makes a direct connection with adult children of aging parents, speaking to them as peers and respecting their point of view.HouseWorks' dedication to helping seniors live independently goes beyond providing great home care services: it also means giving back to the community and forming active affiliations with organizations that share our commitments. Through the company’s remarkable growth and community involvement, HouseWorks is realizing its vision.
The Age Wave, Successful Aging and Liveable Communities
Below is an article from today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune where Ecumen CEO and president Kathryn Roberts discusses how the age wave is an opportunity for the Twin Cities and other communities to create liveable communities that promote successful aging.
You can feel the winds picking up. Last week’s cover story in the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis asked: 'The Age Wave is Coming, Are We Ready?' Saturday’s Star Tribune discussed the explosive growth in parish nurse programs. And soon the Department of Human Services, which has a wealth of statewide research, will hit the road with public forums that compare our coming age wave to Hurricane Katrina. The inherent message: We’re not ready for what we know is coming.As the Twin Cities metro area sprawls, rows of homes rise like islands, with inhabitants needing wheels to leave them. Many area cornfields have been replaced with housing that pretends people don’t grow old.
But we’re aging in record numbers. As state demographer Tom Gillaspy says, 'These things usually creep along at the speed of a glacier. Not so with aging. In demographic terms, this is a tsunami.'Soon the G.I. Generation will disappear. Behind it is the misnamed Silent Generation, born between 1925 and 1942. The Silents mark the beginning of the most educated, technologically connected, discerning seniors we’ve ever seen. And much of the metro area isn’t ready for them or for how they want to age.They don’t want to live in isolation. They want to be near family and friends. They want easy-access transportation. They want housing that’s near health care, learning, exercise, shopping, worship places and other gathering hubs that feed the mind, body and soul. And when they die, they don’t want to be in a sterile cinderblock room bunked with a stranger.Some places get it. St. Louis Park long has viewed aging as an asset. Dakota County just developed a significant aging plan. However, we need to share information and plan together, because there are some pretty cavernous gaps throughout the metro area. Our collective response has to be about more than determining where sewer lines go; it must be about creating vibrant communities for a lifetime.Atlanta, often derided for its missed foresight on transportation planning, learned from its mistakes. Its regional commission’s mantra is ensuring that 'Greater Atlanta is Great for a Lifetime.' It formed Aging Atlanta, with more than 50 public, private and nonprofit partners, to plan for the age wave.Aging Atlanta is digitally mapping its region’s senior housing, community services and transportation hubs to identify gaps, overlaps and potential partnerships across counties. It surveyed residents 55 and older to generate county-specific data that outline emerging seniors' work plans, housing desires, volunteer patterns, preventive-care use and awareness about paying for long-term care.Out of this knowledge, several metro Atlanta counties have new zoning ordinances that provide more universal design and low-maintenance single-level homes. They see senior housing opportunities that can be part of existing neighborhoods or new neighborhoods connected to churches, community centers, college campuses or shopping areas.We could borrow from Atlanta. But we could also add our own components, such as design charrettes that show how we can better integrate senior housing and age holistically with existing infrastructure.While health and housing have been combined in the private sector, in the public sector they reside in separate silos, largely funded by fragmented jurisdictions crossing multiple agencies and regulations. The Twin Cities area has a number of government-run independent living apartments that don’t have health services that could help people age in community.Aging in community minimizes expensive assembly-line care while maintaining valuable social networks. In Detroit Lakes we’ve found an entrepreneurial way to keep seniors in their apartments by working with government. We deliver mobile 24/7 assisted-living services to public senior housing. This could just as easily be occurring in metro-area counties.The Twin Cities area isn’t ready for the age wave. Nor is Atlanta, but it is preparing now for tomorrow. Aging isn’t partisan. We all do it. And, if we do this right, we should all benefit from it.
Alzheimer’s: Different Approaches to Talking About It
Two different approaches to Alzheimers:A. If you get a moment, please visit Kathy Hatfield’s blog at www.KnowItAlz.com. Kathy is a caregiver in North Carolina. She is the primary caregiver for her 79-year-old father who has Alzheimers. Earlier in his life, he was a stockbroker in New York City. Her daily accounts are insightful, warm, compassionate and bring a genuine light-heartedness that only a caregiver could bring. What you take away is that 'yes' her father has lost much of his memory, but he is still very much her father, a human being, and someone who is still very much alive. Aging is all about living … . even at the very end of life. Thanks for sharing your blog with us Kathy.B. The New York Post, a tabloid newspaper recently broke a story that New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner reportedly has Alzheimers. The Headline: Tragic Madness of King George. Peter Himler writes about it at his blog The Flack. Other blogs also hopped on this, using terms of senility, maddness, etc.Last month, Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick wrote that, 'All reasonable signs indicate that [Steinbrenner’s] dementia … is now so profound that he is being carefully hidden from public view.'Getting Rid of the StigmaGeorge Steinbrenner is a public figure (and one that a lot of people don’t like) but let’s get rid of the potshots and embarrasment that seem to be attached to losing one’s memory. Kathy hits it head on and doesn’t 'put her father in the closet.' Unless a cure is found, many of us reading this today are going to have dementia or Ahlzheimers. Consider these stats from the Alzheimer’s Association:- 26.6 million people worldwide were living with the disease in 2006.- Researchers predict that global prevalence of Alzheimer’s will quadruple by 2050 to more than 100 million, at which time 1 in 85 persons worldwide will be living with the disease.- More than 40 percent of those cases will be in late stage Alzheimer’s requiring a high level of attention equivalent to nursing home care.
Senator Amy Klobuchar and the Maze of Caregiving
For consumers, navigating the world of long-term care can be absolutely exhausting and frustrating. People don’t know what to look for, what questions to ask, where to turn for information and how to cut through all the jargon. And if they want to keep their loved one at home, they often have no idea where to turn.Minnesota U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar clearly wants to get rid of the maze and make it easier for the customer. Yesterday she announced the introduction of the AGE Act (American Giving Care to Elders). Its goal is to establish the National Caregiving Resource Center as a central clearinghouse where families, public agencies and private organizations can learn about best practices and promising innovations to support families in their caregiving roles. It also would expand the Federal Dependent Care Credit to include elder care costs and help make sure that those people who buy long-term care insurance get the benefits they signed up and paid for.Kudos to her for taking on an issue that is growing larger every day: helping seniors live where they want to live, how they want to live, and making it easier for family members who are providing care. The Age Wave is coming and you can feel the winds blowing.The Vermont Model (Why don’t we tell people about it in Minnesota?)One tool that would help Minnesota seniors stay in their home is Minnesota’s version of The Vermont Model. Last fall the Wall Street Journal did a front-page story on Vermont’s new 'Choices for Care' program. If a person qualifies for Medicaid, they can use dollars to pay a family caregiver rather than spending that money in a more expensive nursing home. Turns out Minnesota has the same program … and has had it for three years. But no one knows about it. In fact there are approximately 11,000 seniors who are eligible for it and only 164 use it. Look at our Age Wave Study, you’ll find that baby boomers LOVE the program … Read the testimonials on the Minnesota Department of Human Services web site of people who use Minnesota’s Vermont Model … they LOVE it. Don’t you think we could find some marketing dollars somewhere in the state budget to tell people about this program and keep people out of nursing homes?
Holistic Health or Wholistic Health?
There was an interesting article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune the other day on the explosion in popularity of parish nurses. Some of the words that were used are insightful. For example, Rev. Granger Westberg, a Lutheran minister in Chicago, wrote a book in 1984 called: 'The Parish Nurse: Providing a Minister of Health for your Congregation. He said that 'parish nurses should be focused on 'wholistic' health, which he intentionally spelled with a 'w' to stress that it should involve the whole person.Dianne Waarvik, who became a parish nurse at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Minneapolis in 1999, said 'We’re starting to call ourselvesfaith community nurses. That’s because it’s not just Christian churches that have them. Synagogues have them. Mosques have them. It’s spreading everywhere.Aging is likely going to be an exciting new form of ecumenicalism, creating a variety of partnership opportunities for multiple denominations to share skills, talents and expertise in creating holistic or wholistic communities for seniors.
Churches, Senior Housing, and Elder Care
Interesting and very good news from the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. It is launching Catholic Senior Services -- an umbrella' organization that will use the network of Catholic senior care organizations and parish programs in the Twin Cities to become a one-stop resource center for seniors and their families.Catholic Senior Services, which has been in the planning stage for four years, will begin with its four founding organizations: Catholic Eldercare of Minneapolis, the Franciscan Health Community of St. Paul, St. Therese’s New Hope and St. Therese’s Southwest. The goal is to have a Catholic Senior Services center in every one of the 12 counties that make up the archdiocese. This is a coordinated response from teh Archdiocese to prepare for the age wave.We see a great deal of synergy between senior housing and faith communities. Baby boomers told us in our Age Wave study, that they want to be close to spiritual opportunities. We are developing a senior housing development in conjunction with First Lutheran Church in Sandpoint, ID. Ground breaks next month. Aging provides a great opportunity for faith communities to expand their ministry and build community.
Outsourcing Long-Term Care to India
If you ask most Americans, I have to think that they want care in the community that they call home, not overseas. However, this article, which originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week, features a son who moved his father and himself to India for long-term care that cost less than it does here in the U.S. This is a phenomenon that we’ve heard about with surgery, such as hip replacements, but the first time that we’ve seen it in long-term care.The article raises all kinds of questions: How we care for seniors in America … how we pay for care … how we look at aging … .What do you think?