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Ten Warning Signs Your Older Family Member May Need Help

By Featured News, Help-at-Home, Meals-on-Wheels, SixtyPLUS

Changes in physical and mental abilities that may occur with age can be difficult to detect — for older adults and their family members, friends, and caregivers too. Certain behaviors may indicate the need for loved ones to take action. Here are 10 warning signs that your loved one who is an older adult may need some help with living independently:

  • Your loved one has changed eating habits, resulting in losing weight, having no appetite, or missing meals.
  • They have neglected personal hygiene, including wearing dirty clothes and having body odor, bad breath, neglected nails and teeth, or sores on the skin.
  • They have neglected their home, with a noticeable change in cleanliness and sanitation.
  • They are unusually loud, quiet, paranoid, or agitated, or making phone calls at all hours.
  • Relationship patterns have changed, causing friends and neighbors to express concerns.
  • Physical problems, such as burns or injury marks that may result from general weakness, forgetfulness, or misuse of alcohol or prescribed medications.
  • Decreased or reduced participation in activities that were once important to them, such as bridge or a book club, dining with friends, or attending religious services.
  • Forgetfulness, resulting in unopened mail, piling of newspapers, not filling their prescriptions, or missing appointments.
  • Mishandling finances, such as not paying bills, losing money, paying bills twice or more, or hiding money.
  • They have been making unusual purchases, such as buying more than one subscription to the same magazine, entering an unusually large number of contests, or increasing purchases from television advertisements.

If the signs above are raising red flags, resources such as the Administration for Community Living’s Eldercare Locator may be of assistance. For more information about ACL, visit www.acl.gov.

LifeCare Alliance’s wellness, nutrition, and support programs may also help. To make a referral, click here and a member of our team can reach your loved one about services we can offer.

— Content provided by the Administration for Community Living

Representatives from Marion Police Department and LifeCare Alliance

SixtyPLUS Update – Summer 2021

By Featured News, SixtyPLUS

Welcome, New Partners

The Marion Police Department is one of LifeCare Alliance’s newest partners in the SixtyPlus program! We’d like to welcome them and thank them for joining forces with our Agency to address important needs for seniors and people with medical challenges or disabilities in Marion.

Here’s what Officer BJ Gruber said about the new partnership:

“Marion PD chose to partner with LifeCare Alliance because the officers come into contact every day with people who have a host of different needs. In order to be more efficient it is important that they have partner like LifeCare Alliance throughout the community that they can connect with.”

Referral Training

As we continue in our efforts to increase partner referrals, we have developed a partner referral training!  Please email Fannisha Page at Fpage@lifecarealliance.org to register your department for the referral training. This can be done in person or via zoom!

Thank you, London Fire Department, for being the first to attend this training!

Let’s get Referring

Starting in August we are asking our current partners to send over data for any runs made on seniors 60 and older. We will take care of the rest!

Frailty Scale Data: What’s New

Since June 2020, LifeCare Alliance staff members have been administering the Home Care Frailty Scale (HCFS) to all new clients over the age of 60. The HCFS is a 30-point instrument used to evaluate the following six domains: function (e.g., ability to perform housework), movement, cognition and communication, social interaction, nutrition, and clinical diagnoses. The purpose of administering the HCFS is to collect data from clients that represent their current levels of frailty and their specific health needs. LifeCare Alliance staff members complete the HCFS with clients every three months in order to routinely monitor frailty levels and determine the extent to which LifeCare Alliance services help minimize the risk of worsening frailty.

Preliminary analyses (see figure below) of HCFS data have indicated that LifeCare Alliance services may play a key role in helping older adults maintain and/or improve their frailty levels over a three-month time period. HCFS data will continue to be routinely collected from clients and analyzed by the LifeCare Alliance team to examine trends in frailty levels among older clientele.

A full description of the HCFS can be found here.

Dr. Juckett will be presenting frailty data at the Gerontological Society of America conference in Phoenix this November. She has also submitted an abstract depicting LifeCare Alliance’s efforts implementing the Home Care Frailty Scale to the 2021 AcademyHealth Virtual Conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation in Health.

Headshot of Dr. Lisa Juckett

Dr. Lisa Juckett

New to the team

Dr. Govind Hariharan will be serving as our health economist and will estimate the cost savings of LifeCare’s programs for local community agencies and the greater healthcare system.

Dr. Govind Hariharan specializes in the field of health economics and has multiple decades of experience as an award winning researcher, teacher and consultant. He is also the founder of NEO Advisory LLC, a policy and strategic and economic advisory firm.

Dr. Hariharan is often sought after as an advisor for his keen insights and has provided strategic advice on health care, technology, investments and global expansion to companies and governments. He serves or has served on many advisory boards including the American Diabetes Association, WellStar Institute for Better Health, as well as various health care related task forces in Georgia and New York. He has consulted for numerous organizations such as the World Bank, Council for Quality Growth, University of Texas- San Antonio and Life University.

Dr. Hariharan’s research is extensively cited, especially in the areas of health care, public policy and technology of older adults. He has taught or lectured around the world including major U.S., Chinese, Indian and Singaporean Universities. He has been interviewed or quoted in many media outlets including the Financial Times, Investors Daily, O Globo, Atlanta Business Chronicle, Money Talks and National Public Radio.

Dr. Govind Hariharan

This project was supported, in part by grant number 90INNU0016, from the Administration for Community Living, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C. 20201. Grantees undertaking projects with government sponsorship are encouraged to express freely their findings and conclusions. Points of view or opinions do not, therefore, necessarily represent official ACL policy.

SixtyPLUS Update – Winter 2021

By SixtyPLUS

Welcome, New Partners!

The London Fire Department, London Police Department, and Marion Police Department are the latest agencies to partner with LifeCare Alliance.

We are excited to expand this grant into the other counties that we serve. As we continue to Foster our new and current partnerships, we are still looking to add more SixtyPLUS partners.

SixtyPLUS is designed to arm the first responders with the necessary resources to alleviate non-emergency runs while developing a long-term care solution to meet the increasing demand for seniors.  LifeCare Alliance, one of the oldest and largest providers of services for older adults, will intervene to assist in the home, reducing seniors’ reliance on excessive emergency resources.

In many cases, the needs include basic help in the home — such as meals, home repairs, or diabetes management, which can help seniors remain safe, independent, and in their own homes, where they want to be! Partners will securely share relevant data with LifeCare Alliance to identify senior needs and, over time, measure improvements in both service delivery and client outcomes.

Meet Dr. Lisa

Headshot of Dr. Lisa Juckett

Dr. Lisa Juckett, PhD, OTR/L, CHT
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
614-366-7543
Email

If you have not scheduled a meeting with Dr. Lisa  Juckett to discuss your data, please contact her to schedule your meeting!

Dr. Lisa Juckett, PhD, OTR/L, CHT, is an occupational therapist with doctoral training in the field of social work. She has worked for The Ohio State University since 2010 and is currently an Instructor in the Division of Occupational Therapy. Her research focuses on bridging the gap between research discoveries and the use of these discoveries in real-world healthcare settings. Heavily informed by the field of implementation science, Dr. Juckett’s research examines the factors and strategies that influence evidence-based practice adoption, primarily in organizations that serve the older adult population. In partnership with Lifecare Alliance, Dr. Juckett serves as the outcomes evaluator and is monitoring trends in frailty levels, referral sources, and the types of services received by Lifecare Alliance clients.

Who should you refer?

When partners go to a call, there may be some question as to whether the person you are responding to is a good fit for a LifeCare Alliance referral.

Here are some helpful factors to remember: Any person over 60 who is a lift assist, hoarder, is diabetic, indicates malnutrition, suffers from mental health or memory issues, has a physical disability, or calls frequently for emergent or non-emergent needs should be referred.

Remember, our services are not based on income but on physical and mental need. For more information, please refer to our Referral Cheat Sheet or our online referral form!

Getting to know your Contact

Headshot of Fannisha Page

Fannisha Page, CHW
LifeCare Alliance
614-437-2881
Email

Fannisha Page, CHW, is a certified Community Health Worker. She was born in Columbus, Ohio, is a proud graduate of Columbus Alternative High School, and attended The University of Memphis. She has been with LifeCare Alliance for one year. Fannisha previously worked as a Community Health Worker for Primary One’s women’s health center. Fannisha is certified in Centering Pregnancy, as a State Tested Nurse’s Assistant, and a CPR instructor. She has experience as a patient care technician in the emergency department and administrative support in mental health facilities in Lima, Ohio. Fannisha is a wife, mother of 3 beautiful girls, and an entrepreneur.

Fannisha is passionate about outreach and working with first responders and other community agencies to ensure that seniors are receiving fair access to resources so that they can remain safe, independent, and living in their homes — where they want to be.

SixtyPLUS is provided by a grant from the U.S. Administration for Community Living, and administered by LifeCare Alliance.

About SixtyPLUS

LifeCare Alliance is one of seven nonprofits chosen from a nationwide pool of applicants to study the effectiveness of services offered to seniors in American communities.

Through this study, called SixtyPLUS and funded by the Administration for Community Living, LifeCare Alliance will help create a national model to address the needs of the nation’s growing senior population. We will implement unique and innovative partnerships with fire departments, hospital systems, and healthcare providers while collecting accurate data that represent the true impact of our services.

Together, we can “bridge the gap” between the healthcare system and the community-based service system for the betterment of our seniors.