Program helps keep elders out of nursing homes

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March 27, 2007

Program helps keep elders out of nursing homes

Sam Carter The Gloucester Daily Times Tue Mar 27, 2007, 12:58 AM EDT

After her mother died last May, Susanne Kimball began to care for her 88-year-old father, Manuel Silva, full time at his house in Bay View.

In the morning she bathes and dresses him, then makes his breakfast and helps him with his medications. She assists him back into his room, where he lights a single candle at the altar of his late wife of 66 years. For the rest of the day, Kimball said her father will sit outside if it isn’t too chilly, watch as she does housework, talk to other family members who might phone or stop by the house, and always tunes in at 7 p.m. for “Walker, Texas Ranger.”

“I feel great,” Silva said, “because she always does what I ask of her. She’s been awful good to me.”

“You can never be too good to your father,” said Kimball, 63, as she rubbed her father’s shoulder affectionately.

For Kimball and many other Massachusetts residents, the norm for placing aging parents or disabled adults into nursing homes is becoming a thing of the past. A new state and federally funded program pays them up to $18,000 to take care of aging parents at home or provide foster care for elderly strangers or disabled adults.

“It’s a supplement for me to stay home and be with my dad,” Kimball said, “and keep him away from a nursing home.”

The program, which got underway Dec. 1, is called Caregiver Homes and is managed by Seniorlink Inc., which is based in Boston. Both the state’s Executive Office of Elder Affairs and federal Medicaid provide financial support for the program.

“I look at it as a practical way as a taxpayer,” said Gloria Martin, 57, who provides foster care for a 90-year-old man in her home on the Ipswich River in Ipswich. “It costs less than putting him into a nursing home.”

That is exactly what the goal of Caregiver Homes is, said Linda Morreale-Steele, Seniorlink’s program director.

“We’re getting the word out there,” Morreale-Steele said, “because there are so many people who need this service.” Keeping elderly or frail adults within the comforts of their own home, where they can live out the rest of their days in tranquility, is something the more than 40 Caregiver Homes participants have all wished for, Morreale-Steele said.

Martin agreed. She said when she and her husband visited nursing homes throughout the North Shore area, they constantly met elderly people who were still mentally proficient.

“We were blown away by some of the people we met in the nursing homes who really didn’t belong there,” Martin said.

According to Martin, the problem isn’t that some elderly people are institutionalized despite their being mentally sound, but that their family members are either unwilling or unable to provide home care 24 hours per day, seven days per week.

Caring for an elderly person every hour of every day sounds tough, but Martin and Kimball would argue otherwise. Kimball said she enjoys working with the elderly, and Martin said it isn’t any different than the time she devoted to raising her children more than 30 years ago.

The Caregiver Homes program has been going so well, Morreale-Steele said, that she has received more than 20 phone calls in the last few days from people interested in participating. Even with the addition of 20 more participants, Morreale-Steele doubts if the program will come close to running out of money.

“I think with the success of this program, maybe (the state and Medicaid) will increase the funds,” she said.

“(The program) could go bankrupt tomorrow, who knows,” Kimball said, “but that wouldn’t stop me from taking care of my father.”

The process of signing up can be slow. For Martin it took nearly five months before her foster adult moved in. Kimball had the advantage of already living in the same house as her father. Morreale-Steele said the time between an initial application and final consent can be anywhere from two weeks to a couple of months and is based on income, reference checks and a home assessment. Once approved, the program’s participant must submit a daily report of everything that took place, from morning to evening.

But the weeks waited and days spent caring for frail bodies pay off.

“It’s in my heart,” Martin said. “I just want (my foster adult) to have good years. He’s such a joy, and I do hope he’s with us for a long time.”

New homes

Caregiver Homes is a state and federally funded program that provides a modest allowance to people who opt to care for their elderly parents at home, or provide foster care to an elderly or disabled adult, keeping those people out of nursing homes and in a safe, comfortable environment. Program applicants can expect to wait more than two weeks and up to five months for approval. Here are the basics:

r Start with a telephone interview with a placement coordinator.

r Complete an application.

r Agree to reference checks, including a criminal background check.

r Have a personal interview at home.

r Allow a recruiter to perform a home assessment to assure the environment is safe and sound for an elder.

r Sign a Caregiver Agreement.

r Further information can be found at the Caregiver Homes Web site: www.caregiverhomes.com

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