The Legacy Film Festival on Aging, May 13-15, 2011

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Aging in Place: You do not need to leave your home!

Given that 89% of people do not want to leave their homes, this statement featured on the article The Technology for Monitoring Elderly Relatives on The New York Times (July 28, 2010) about new technologies to help people stay at their home, makes total sense.

The purpose of many of these technologies is to provide enough supervision to make it possible for elderly people to stay in their homes rather than move to an assisted-living facility or nursing home — a goal almost universally embraced as both emotionally and financially desirable.

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Thanks to a partnership between the S.F.-based start-up Engage As You Age and the Berkeley-based Small Press Distributors, Marin seniors can join a six-session book group facilitated by an accomplished anthropologist and journalist. The two organizations share a vision to bring high-level conversation and social stimulation to all seniors.

Engage As You Age provides one-on-one, individualized social visits to homebound or isolated seniors, and also provides history, politics and theater workshops at assisted living facilities in the Bay Area. The book group is an extension of this meaningful work, said Ben Lewis, founder and owner of Engage.

“Reading doesn’t have to be a solo endeavor,” Lewis said. “This book group speaks to the growing number of smart seniors who crave a literary social outlet just for them.”

The book group begins Jan. 14 and will meet Fridays from 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. through Feb. 18 at the Mill Valley Recreation Center, 180 Camino Alto, Mill Valley. SPD is also partnering with the Marin Free County Library to sponsor three other senior book groups, including one in Spanish, at various locations in Marin.

Participants will receive free copies of SPD’s books: “I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody,” by Sinan Antoon, and “Khirbet Khizeh,” by S. Yizhar. Both novels are set in the Middle East and explore the tumult of Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq and newly-independent Israel. The facilitated sessions are also free of charge thanks to support from the Marin Community Foundation.

Lewis tapped Oakland resident Adrian McIntyre to lead the six-session group. McIntyre has spent the past 12 years working as an archaeologist, educator, journalist and humanitarian aid worker. He reported for Newsweek during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and has worked for aid organizations in Baghdad and Darfur. McIntyre earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from U.C. Berkeley in 2010.

McIntyre also works for Engage As You Age. “I visit a 90-year old man every week in Berkeley, and I’m inspired by Engage’s efforts to revitalize seniors’ lives through meaningful and stimulating conversation.”

Interested seniors can sign up for the book group by calling Engage As You Age at (415) 690-6944.

About Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org)
SPD is a Berkeley-based literary arts organization that distributes independently published books from around the world. The book group is part of SPD’s “I Remember Project,” a program that seeks to actively engage seniors via literature by making SPD’s books available to them in book groups.

About Engage As You Age (www.engageasyouage.com)
Engage As You Age creates inter-generational connections between creative people and homebound or isolated older adults and seniors to stimulate and enhance cognitive and social interactions while giving immediate family members some welcome respite from continuing care responsibilities.

The Wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006. As of August 2010, the Wii leads the generation over the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in worldwide sales and in December 2009 broke the record for best-selling console in a single month in the United States.

Nintendo hoped to target a wider demographic with its console. The productions are Nintendo’s first broad-based advertising strategy and include a two-minute video clip showing a varied assortment of people enjoying the Wii system, such as urban apartment-dwellers, country ranchers, grandparents, and parents with their children.The marketing campaign has proved to be successful: pensioners,  as old as 103 have been reported to be playing the Wii in the United Kingdom.^. A report by the British newspaper The People also stated that Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain has played using the Wii console!

Now,  we have data that the Wii games have brought back feelings of being young again as the participants flex their mental muscles and improve their physical fitness. The Wii is improving the quality of life of many aging seniors.

Diane Carbo, in an article written for Senior Advice, states that “…Healthy aging and a brain fitness program along with the Wii promotes the development of new skills, and helps aging seniors learn from their mistakes. The best part of using the Wii as part of a healthy aging program is the laughter and excitement you see in the faces of the participants. The environment is electric as the aging seniors enjoy familiar interests in a new format. For many seniors it feels like old times again…”

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The Health Day Article by Dennis Thompson states “…Research into Alzheimer’s disease has reached a point of significant potential, even as the disease’s looming impact on society grows more and more dire, experts say. Some leading scientists, in fact, worry that we may not be doing enough to press forward with key advances and new insights into Alzheimer’s, the most common type of dementia among older people…”

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More than 40 percent of adult patients in acute care hospital beds are 65 or older. Seventy million Americans will have turned 65 by 2030. They include the 85-and-older cohort, the nation’s fastest-growing age group. Elderly people often have multiple chronic illnesses, expensive to treat, and they are apt to require costly hospital re-admissions, sometimes as often as 10 times in a single year. Living Well Assisted Living at Home has designed a new model of comprehensive care that will help care for elders at home, including those who are frail, recovering from surgery, accidents or any illness. The model also strives to care for those suffering from dementia, at home.

In an article written by Milt Freudenheim for the Health section of the New York Times, in June 28, 2010, we find how geriatricians and other professionals are lobbying for best practices in the field of aging.  In the article it is stressed the fact of how “..to stay independent, the elderly will need to stay healthy. Many of these people could be back on the golf course and enjoying their grandchildren if we did the right thing for them,” said Mary D. Naylor, a longtime geriatric care researcher and professor of gerontology in the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsilvania. Her research showed that even fragile older people could avoid a quick return to the hospital if they are managed by teams of nurses, social workers, physicians and therapists, together with their own family members. Hospital re-admissions, which cost $17 billion a year, could be reduced by 20 percent — $3.5 billion — or more, she said…” Obviously a new approach to care for the elder is imperative if we wnat to promote wellness in this sector of the population and reduce the increasing costs of caring for seniors.

Mr. Freudenheim continues by saying: “…Many internists, family physicians and other primary care doctors are lobbying for payments for a team approach based in the physician’s office. The concept, which they call a patient-centered medical home, will be tried out under the new health care law by Medicare, Medicaid and some private insurers. Secretary Sebelius has called the medical home idea “one of our most promising models for improving the quality of care and bringing down health care costs…”

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“…Who are tomorrow’s seniors going to call when the going gets rough? Today’s young adult may not have a child to help out when they become older? Today’s adult is having less children. Because of this when they are elderly they may need to have non-traditional support networks or pay for the care that past generations relied on their own children for. That’s the findings of Jacques Légaré, professor at the Université de Montréal. Légaré studies

Baby Boomers Aging

aging baby-boomers. Baby Boomers are a generation that had fewer children and were less likely to have a stable marriage. Légaré  stated that until 2030 the family circle involving senior citizens will be evolving. For about 70 percent of today’s frail seniors the family circle provides care. Generally that care comes from the children or their spouse. They are the last population before the baby boom after World War II. Today’s Baby Boomer generation is rapidly hitting the golden years but not with the same family security that their parents had. With divorce, blended families and common-law unions the family scheme is vastly different than in their parents’ day. Adding in medical advancements that have increased life span brings an unclear picture of who is going to care for those unable to care for themselves. “Tomorrow’s elderly – today’s boomers – had far fewer children. Who will take care of them?” Légaré asked, “They risk finding themselves in difficult circumstances and might have to turn to the public system or pay their way.”

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Living Well Supports Diversity on Aging

The Administration on Aging just released A Toolkit for Serving Diverse Communities.

This Toolkit provides the Aging Network and its partners with a replicable and easy-to-use method for providing respectful, inclusive, and sensitive services for any diverse community. The Toolkit consists of a four-step process and a questionnaire that assists professionals, volunteers and grassroots advocates with every stage of program planning, implementation and service delivery for older adult communities, their families and caregivers.

The core principles of the toolkit include respect, inclusion and sensitivity as the hallmarks of quality service. This Toolkit is an invitation to make a cultural shift in service provision, to learn, to grow and fully appreciate the diverse community of older adults that agencies and their partners serve.

Download the AoA Diversity Tool Kit

CIHI’s study found that, while about one in four (26%) seniors living in a residential care facility had a diagnosis of depression, a further one in five (18%) had symptoms of depression with no documented diagnosis. Residents were considered to have symptoms of depression if they had a score of at least 3 on the Depression Rating Scale, which measures symptoms such as persistent anger, tearfulness and repetitive anxiety. Read More