Yahoo News, February 9th, 2011

Joyce Kane lives with two women who pay rent, don’t smoke and like her cats.

Kane, a 64-year-old divorcee, has been sharing her central New Jersey
home with strangers for 10 years and depends on them for both income and
company.

She is one of a growing number of seniors across the United States who
live with paying guests in their homes and find that the lodgers are not
only an economic lifeline but also an emotional anchor.

“In order to stay in my home after a divorce I needed additional
income,” said Kane, who has had seven sharers and describes it as a
wonderful experience, and one she recommends to others.

“I’ve had some great relationships with the homesharers,” she added.

In New Jersey, such partnerships are brokered by Homesharing, Inc., a
nonprofit group that links homeowners — often but not always seniors –
with people who can’t afford to buy or rent their own homes and are
willing to take a room or two in someone else’s house.

The service is free, although the group accepts donations from
participants. Both the homeowners and the people seeking a home are
thoroughly screened and everyone is interviewed.

“Our rate (of success) is better than first-time marriages,” said Renee
Drell, executive director of Homesharing, Inc, one of many similar
organizations across the United States.

Demand from both homeowners and those who want to live in their houses
increases every year, and has accelerated with the economic downturn.

“What has been happening the last few years is that more people who are
homeowners need this as other costs rise and their income remains
stable,” Drell explained. “And there is always the population that need
this program, but it has increased in intensity now as people have lost
their jobs. “

She has seen demand increase by about 19 percent from 1,610 clients in
2009 to 1,912 through November 2010. Those looking to move into someone
else’s home are often middle-aged women who have fallen on hard times.

Read more of this article.

The New York Times, December 30th, 2010

Patricia Wendler had been trying to sell her Southport, N.C., home
for four years. Just before Thanksgiving, she finally got an offer, with
one major contingency: Mrs. Wendler, 80, had less than three weeks to
move, or no deal.

She and her husband, who died in 2008, had retired to Southport 16
years ago from New Hartford, N.Y. In that time, the Wendlers had
accumulated furniture that wouldn’t fit in her new apartment, tools she
wouldn’t need and years upon years of paperwork. “I kind of stored
everything,” she said.

Her daughter-in-law, June Wendler, described the task of relocation
as a “tornado.” She called Jane Roberts, a senior move manager in
Wilmington, N.C., for help.

Initially, Patricia Wendler was not thrilled.

“I was a little resentful,” she said. “Why would I need someone like that? I’m not used to having people do things for me.”

The Wendlers are among more than 50,000 families to hire a certified
senior move manager this year, up from 30,000 just two years ago,
according to the National Association of Senior Move Managers. These
services don’t come cheap: Most move managers charge $25 to $60 per
hour. A top-to-bottom move can require several days of planning, packing
and unpacking, running $1,500 to $4,000 or more — not including the
cost of the actual movers.

Despite the expense, many families are finding senior move managers
indispensable, and not just because they handle the logistics. Tensions
can spill over when an elderly parent must relocate. Hundreds of
necessary decisions and actions can swallow time the family may not
have; the inevitable negotiations and concessions can trouble even the
best parent-child relationships.

Surveys show that the elderly overwhelmingly wish to remain in their
long-term homes, and to many of them moving represents a loss of
control. “These moves usually are precipitated by something that’s
happened — a health crisis, a death of a spouse, a loss of driving
ability,” said Margit Novack, a senior move manager in Philadelphia.

A good move manager helps to clear a path to the new home while
ensuring that the senior is always in control, regardless of who made
the first call. “These people don’t want anyone telling them what to do.
You have to walk a very fine line,” said Ms. Roberts.

Read more of this article.

Relocation Assistance:  Many Seniors who are retiring or downsizing elsewhere find that they need help in the herculean logistic task of getting to their new home with all their possessions, and setting themselves up there.  Relocation Assistance covers a variety of services that can help seniors with the often-traumatic process.

The New York Times, December 13th, 2010

If you have a relative in a nursing home, you’ve probably had variants of these conversations:

Visitor: How’s my father doing today?
Aide: Which one is your father?

Or:
Visitor: Is my mother’s appetite better today?
Aide: I’m not sure; I wasn’t here yesterday.

Or:
Visitor: How’s my aunt getting along with her new roommate?
Aide: I’m sorry, I don’t know. I usually work on the third floor.

The problem isn’t that certified nursing assistants, who provide the
great bulk of hands-on care in nursing homes, are as a group callous or
unobservant.

It’s that they typically rotate through the facility, moving from one
floor or unit or shift to another as needed, which rarely allows them
to truly know the fragile old people in their care.

The idea that the same aides should care for the same residents, day
after day, has come to be known as “consistent assignment.” It hardly
seems a radical proposition.

The Commonwealth Fund’s ongoing national campaign to improve nursing home quality
recommends that no more than eight staff members care for a single
resident in a month. (Six would be better, but because administrators
have to cover three shifts each weekday and three more on weekends, and
to find substitutes when aides take sick days or vacations, eight seemed
a reasonable goal.)

Nearly 43 percent of nursing homes have signed on to the Advancing
Excellence in America’s Nursing Home campaign, which began four years
ago. Yet Dr. Mary Jane Koren, the geriatrician who is leading the
campaign, estimates that only a quarter of homes practice consistent
assignment on weekdays and perhaps only 10 percent for all shifts on all
days.

“Estimate” and “perhaps” are the operative terms; nobody really knows
how many nursing homes meet this standard. But life could be so much
better for residents and staff if they did.

“A lot of research shows that by far the most important thing for
long-term residents, for quality of life and quality of care, is their
relationships with their caregivers,” said Barbara Bowers, a nursing
professor and researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Most
people would actually take inferior technical care done by somebody they
care about, who cares about them,” over skilled care by a string of
strangers, she said.

Such relationships, hard to establish with revolving-door staffs,
provide more than warm feelings, important as those can be. They’re
often the first line of defense against health crises and preventable
hospitalization.

Read more of this article.