Working With Older Adults

One of my soap boxes, as anyone who knows me will tell you, is that there aren't enough people specializing in aging issues, whether they are social workers, doctors, or even home builders. Over the years I've been to a lot of seminars lamenting this fact; I've even given a few of those seminars.

Go into any social work/nursing/medical school class and ask students what they plan to specialize in, and almost unanimously the answer is families/children/pediatrics/babies. I have yet speak to any class of college students where someone admits they want to work with older adults.

And I was the same way when I was in graduate school. I was going to work with teenagers, and my first job out of graduate school was with Child Protective Services. The strange thing is, I'm not a "kid" person, and never have been.

My colleagues and I have all tried to figure out how we can make working with older adults more appealing, going so far as to offer paid stipends to social work interns, with some limited success. The research that has been done on the subject has shown that students who have had positive experiences with older adults are more likely to consider working with older adults. So I was intrigued to read this article in the New York Times today.

It's about a program where medical students actually live in a nursing home for a short period of time. The students are given a "diagnosis" and they are expected to receive care just as if they actually had the diagnosis. The students interviewed for the piece talked about how they came away with a much better understanding of the needs and experiences of nursing home residents, but they also feel they interact differently with all patients.

This sounds like a unique program, and one that would benefit all kinds of health care professionals and students.

It's Never Too Early to Plan

Back in the early '90's I went on a wonderful sailing vacation in the British Virgin Islands with a group of friends. We spent time researching charter companies, we researched the islands themselves, we planned menus and even took groceries with us. Once there, we shopped again for provisions, we read maps and charts, and we plotted the course for our two weeks in the islands. Before we ever got there, we knew we wanted to go to Foxy's on Jost Van Dyke, Cane Garden Bay, made famous by Jimmy Buffett, and the Baths on Virgin Gorda.

All in all, we probably spent more time planning for and anticipating this vacation than we actually spent on the vacation. I suspect many of you have had similar experiences, whether it's a vacation trip to Disney World or a camping trip to Big Bend.

I bring this up because I heard somewhere recently that many people spend more time planning a vacation than they spend either on planning for retirement, for later life health issues, or how to manage finances in later life.

This was something I had never thought of before, but as I have been thinking about it, I'm sure there is a lot of truth to the statement. One thing I have learned is that it is never too early to plan for anything, especially something as important as retirement, which has a huge impact on quality of life. Another thing I have learned is to plan for the worst, and hope for the best.

As part of a Life Care Planning Law Firm, this is what I help people do. The Life Care Planning concept is designed to help the older adult with a chronic disease process plan for the future. Traditionally, we have dealt with chronic illness as a series of reactions. We feel bad, the doctor prescribes medicine, we get worse, we go to the hospital, maybe we have surgery, maybe we go home; and the cycle starts over again. Too often the patient is a passive participant in this process, with little input or decision making capacity. My goal is to help people take responsibility for their health and health care needs, and to become a more active participant in the decision-making process.

In future posts I'll give some examples of how this new way of planning has been able to help people.