The New York Times scored big when it get health writer Tara Parker-Pope from The Wall Street Journal.  She has a great story today on Alzheimer’s and how physicians feel that it manifests itself in people’s lives earlier than old age.  Here’s an excerpt:

Many scientists believe the best hope of progress, maybe the only hope, lies in detecting the disease early and devising treatments to stop it before brain damage becomes extensive. Better still, they would like to intervene even sooner, by identifying risk factors and treating people preventively — the same strategy that has markedly lowered death rates from heart disease, stroke and some cancers.

This is a fascinating story, especially for Baby Boomers who told us in our Age Wave study that getting Alzheimer’s is one of their biggest fears about growing older.

Tara also has a great new blog appropriately called “Well.”  It’s focused on what’s so absolutely critical to successful aging . . . taking small proactive steps to take more control of our own health.   We welcome Well to our blog roll.

What state is your ideal retirement place?

Below are the top 10 states where retirees 60+ relocate.  The data comes from  Dr. Mark Fagan at Jacksonville State University in Alabama and his report called “Retirement Development and Job Creation.”

 STATE                   NUMBER
1. Florida                     394,254
2. Arizona                   134,583
3. California                 127,757
4. Texas                      100,700
5. North Carolina           74,937
6. Nevada                      61,627
7. Pennsylvania             60,430
8. Virginia                      59,976
9. Georgia                      57,992
10. New Jersey             54,657

It will be interesting to see if other communities or regions, such as Northern Wisconsin where a lot of people from the Twin Cities and Chicago go in the summer, become larger senior housing and healthcare hubs to serve people that want to stay in those areas.

It’s LaRhae Knatterud’s title at the Minnesota’s Department of Human Services.  She was a driving force behind the fabulous Project 2030 research done between 1997 and 2002, looking ahead at the Age Wave that is moving ever closer.

She and others from the Minnesota Department of Human Services have begun an extensive Minnesota 2010 road trip talking about the “age wave” and opportunities for transformation.  Go here  for more information and to find an upcoming 2010 Summit near your community.

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 families

Founded 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.

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.

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 Stigma

George 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.

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 ourselves faith 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. 

Ian Morrisson is a futurist who deals a lot in healthcare and has spoken at a number of long-term care conferences.  He’ll be one of the headliners at Mayo Clinic’s 2008 National Symposium on Health Care Reform.  It’s kind of interesting to take a look back at what a futurist says and then what actually happens.  Check out this excerpt from a 1999 Nursing Home magazine interview with Ian:

 Changing demographics related to an increase in the aging population continue to fuel the post-acute care industry. What are your thoughts on public policy in this area as we look ahead?

Morrison: The numbers of those over 65 really begin to increase starting in 2020. The fastest-growing segment of the population today is the group over 85 years old, and this is expected to continue. I think this creates tremendous opportunities and challenges. The post-acute care industry has really suffered under the recent Medicare reimbursement changes. Part of the problem is that we don’t have a clear concept of what our national policy is toward older persons and how we will care for them. Our default policy is Medicaid, to take care of those in nursing homes, which is unsatisfactory. It is not a sustainable plan. The question then becomes, can we build policy instruments, such as long-term care funding systems in the private sector, to alleviate some of the inevitable public burden? And, can we restructure the Medicare system?

Obviously there will continue to be a need for home healthcare, nursing homes and residential living centers. Do you see new entrants to the market?

Morrison: I think it’s about life care. There will be an explosion of opportunities over the next 20 to 30 years, which will involve some existing components, such as home healthcare, and others that will be newly created, because I don’t think that the average baby-boomer’s aspiration is to spend his last years in a traditional nursing home. I think we are going to want to “do everything” until our last breath.

And information technology’s role?

Morrison: Hugely important. You are going to have a bunch of 80-year-olds who have been Net-literate since they were 40, and they are going to look for services to be delivered electronically and, potentially, by very intelligent and sophisticated instruments. Many will also seek social support from communications technology.

Any concluding thoughts to offer our readers?

Morrison: Step up to the leadership challenge. In the final analysis, leadership is about values. It’s important to have a dialogue with people about what they believe in, what they see as the goal and purpose of the organization. If leaders can “connect the dots” in terms of the values and motivations of the organization’s stakeholders, then we can have a better healthcare system.

Ian is Pretty Right On

His analysis in 1999 is pretty spot on: A national public policy system (and so many states’ policies) that aren’t anywhere ready for the age wave, new technology and new products, and the need for all of us to step up to the leadership challenge to deliver what a new generation of customers will want (they tell us in the Ecumen age wave study).  It’s a cliche, but what a blue ocean opportunity for long-term care.  It’s our turn to build the future.

It won’t be a surprise when , one of the pioneers in developing Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs), enters Minnesota.  They have a lot of appealing features that people would dig here.

Check out this Erickson Retirement Communities  commercial.  It hits directly at what a lot of what people are thinking, . . . they want something different.   

What are your thoughts on the commercial?

At Left, Leah-Killian Smith, leader at The Villages of North Branch is warmly greeted by resident Edna Holmgren during one of the last days of a former county nursing home in North Branch, Minn.  Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii, Star Tribune.

“This is going to be so different.  My new room will be nice.  But the rest of the place is so interesting that I don’t think I’ll be spending much time in my room anymore.”

The above quote by Carole Feakes, who is moving today from Green Acres Country Care Center in North Branch to the new Ecumen community of The Villages of North Branch, really outlines a big difference between the the yesterday and today in our profession.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a very interesting story about The Villages of North Branch, a new senior housing development that will open today. 

The All-Important IT Factor

While The Villages of North Branch is brand new and beautiful, The Villages’ success is going to be driven by the team members who create and nurture IT. 

Find out more about IT in this discussion launched by Debbie Manthey.  Share your thoughts.  IT is what makes the beautiful interior design of bricks and mortar come to life.  The IT is what you’ll find today as The Villages team members and community volunteers welcome 68 people to their brand new homes.  The IT is IT.

Before and After Photos

Here are some of the before and after photos from North Branch.  One photo you’ll notice is a collage of historic photos from North Branch.  The Villages of North Branch feature a number of photos from the Historical Society.  What will be particularly neat is that there will be story tellers who live at The Villages who will be able to to share the stories that these photos represent.