How Do You Age in Place?

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7 min read

NAIPC conceives an in-home service delivery system

Aging in Place may now be a familiar term, but it remains a vague idea. Those familiar with the term would most likely define aging in place as remaining in your home for as long as you would like to as opposed to relocating to a care facility. This is a comforting notion. Rather than envisioning spending later life cooped up in a nearly bare room amidst ailing people with that medicinal smell in the air, you can anticipate maintaining your active lifestyle amongst friends and the smell of your garden. But is it a false promise?

As we age, we all tend to need assistance. It may be medical attention, caregiving to help us with daily activities, home modification, financial advice, or access to transportation. Over time, our children move on to their own family responsibilities and we may also lose friends, so we might need help finding the social interaction that has always brought joy to our lives. Some solutions to each of these needs may be conveniently available at home and on devices in this digital age. But as we develop cognitive, mobility and confidence issues, they are no longer as convenient. As Teresa Lee of the Alliance for Quality Home Health and Innovation says earlier in this issue, “We have the gap between the healthcare system and so many critical long-term services, support and infrastructure that really are needed for people to stay healthy and age in place.”

What aging in place needs to become (and to become commonly known as) is an in-home service delivery system. This is a big idea and a big task and I can’t think of anything similar that now exists to offer as an example. But two images come to mind that may make this idea easier to grasp:

One is a department store in which each visitor has a personal shopper. Imagine such a store in which one counter is options for making your home easier to navigate, the next counter offers a choice of caregivers, another offers transportation services, still another provides food delivery, and you are accompanied by an expert in all of this who can help evaluate what you need and provide suggestions.

The other image is an Amazon for Aging. Amazon began as a website that sold books. Now it sells everything. It’s a one-stop shop that you access from your desk or phone.

Enter NAIPC
The National Aging in Place Council is in the process of building this department store, establishing both phone and digital access and training the personal shoppers.

NAIPC is an alliance of in-home aging service providers all across the country. It is a national organization that functions on a local level. Currently operating in 25 cities and expanding rapidly, people from many different service businesses, senior-focused organizations and government agencies unite in a community as the local chapter to educate residents about aging in place and make their services available via the chapter. In Atlanta or Charleston, for example, the local chapter offers more than 50 different in-home services that can be accessed at ageinplace.org.  In addition to editing this magazine, I have the privilege of serving as the Executive Director of NAIPC.

Eventually, we hope the local NAIPC chapter will be the one-stop shop in each community. It will save aging adults from having to search individually for the assistance they need to be able to age in place. It will also eliminate the trust issue. All of us are skittish about inviting strangers into our homes—and as we age this reluctance intensifies. But all members of the NAIPC chapter in your town have had background checks, been screened and interviewed by local chapter leadership, signed a Code of Conduct in which they pledge to put clients’ needs first, and, perhaps most significantly, have interacted over time with other chapter members who have observed their professional behavior.

Planning to age in place
At a summit of aging thought leaders convened by NAIPC, the main takeaway was that we have a habit as a society of waiting for an emergency before we take any action. As an organization, we concluded that we needed to try to shift the aging conversation from simply explaining aging in place to helping people plan to age in place.

To support this effort, NAIPC members from around the country collaborated to create a planning tool called Act III: Your Plan for Aging in Place that is available on our website, ageinplace.org. Act III provides a method for aging adults to assess their own circumstances. What do we have and what do we need? It is divided into five categories—home, health and wellness, personal finance, transportation and social engagement. In each category, users are asked a series of questions that lead to an evaluation of their current situation and provides a view of the assistance, services, and costs they will face as they age.

Aging in Place specialists
So now that we have the planning document, how do we encourage people who need it to utilize it and help them navigate it? This made us realize there was a field of expertise missing in our culture, a new occupation that needed to be created—the Aging in Place Specialist.

To fill this gap, we decided the first step was to train all of our members across the country (as well as senior service providers who are not members but would like to participate) to not only understand the service their business provides, but also to understand all the other services available from their chapter. We began to achieve this via individual presentations at chapter meetings.

Now we are about to embark on a series of seminars around the country in partnership with universities in which aging experts will train service providers to utilize the Act III planning tool and guide their clients through it.

Our Act III Road Show will be presented at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC on December 2, 2016 and at the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA on February 10, 2017. Additional Road Shows are in planning stages.

In addition, NAIPC is collaborating with the School of Social Health at Stony Brook University in New York to develop a college course for social work students to train them to be Aging in Place Specialists.

Testing the delivery system
By the middle of 2017, we will have the beginning of a large national force of Aging in Place Specialists dispersing the same message across the country: You need to plan to age and we can help you do this utilizing Act III.

At that point, we intend to launch a pilot program for the in-home service delivery system in Atlanta, Georgia in collaboration with the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the Atlanta Regional Commission. The “Call HAL” campaign will feature a Home Assistance Line on which people who need advice or assistance can contact a trained Aging in Place Specialist, share the results of their Act III personal needs assessment and be directed to vetted service providers who can provide the assistance they need. GTRI will monitor the outcomes of aging adults who utilize the “Call HAL” service. We plan for this to be a replicable model that we can then spread around the country.

Filling the gap
At conferences and gatherings of those seeking solutions to the issues of aging, the conversation frequently focuses on the fragmentation of the senior service sector. There are great ideas emerging and many dedicated practitioners. But how do seniors learn about or find any of this?

NAIPC’s program is designed to help solve this problem by organizing each community and providing local residents with the tools to plan their later lives and conveniently access the assistance they will need.

To learn more or join the effort, visit ageinplace.org.