"The Ugly Truth About Ageism: It's a Prejudice Targeting Our Future Selves"

  ©   Imelda Maurer, cdp  September 17, 2018

This blog title is that of an article in The Guardian recently.  I certainly cannot improve on the concepts or the writing, so I include just a few paragraphs from an informative and thought-provoking piece. The entire article can be accessed here.

"We love the elders in our lives and we all hope to grow old, so why does this personal interest not translate into public policy?"  (My own editorializing here ---  it could read, 'why does our love for our elders so rarely translate into environments, policies, procedures, programs and practices that make this love and respect  visible and self-evident to our elders as well as to any observers or visitors to these communities?')

"You see them in most aged-care facilities, seated on pastel-colored lounges, being babysat by a TV they are mostly not watching. Some are asleep, some are sedated, some are cognitively impaired. Seeing them like this, it’s hard to remember they were once young, vital and independent. What’s harder is thinking that it might one day be you."

"So why have we failed to do better by our elderly needing care? Why do we settle for conditions that leave many of them bored, lonely and poorly fed in a way we would never tolerate for ourselves?"

"One underlying cause could be deeply entrenched ageism. It often begins with the language we use. According to writer Ashton Applewhite, if we diminish our regard for the senior members of our society verbally, we are likely to do the same when it comes to the way we frame policy – removing their dignity and sense of agency in condescending generalizations that assume vulnerability and dependence instead of resilience and independence."

"Unlike other prejudices such as racism and sexism, which are manifestations of fear of the other, ageism is unique in targeting our future selves."

 “No prejudice is rational,” says Applewhite. “But with ageism, we have internalised it. We have been complicit in our own marginalisation and it will require active consciousness-raising to correct that, just as the women’s movement did."

Are we ready to engage in active consciousness-raising around issues of ageism?  For my readers who are women religious, there is an urgent call here for us to engage on this issue for the social justice issue that it is! 

Culture Change: Let's Not Make it a Cliché

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Reissued September 5, 2018

There is a wonderful revolution taking place in (albeit all too few) nursing homes across the country. As long as there are parents who say to their children, ‘Promise me you’ll never put me in a nursing home,” or any of us groan to think that we may spend our last days in a medical institution that is foreign to any feel or sense of “home” with all its deep and deeply personal implications, then there is need for this revolution, this transformation, to spread.

It goes by several names: Culture Change; Transformative Nursing Homes: Resident-Centered Care; Person-Centered Care; Green House Model; Household  Model, Wellspring

What all these terms have in common is a philosophy that holds to the following values and attitudes:

•           The resident is put back into the driver’s seat, making as many choices about his/her daily life as possible. One implication is that activities and care revolve around the resident as much as           possible, as contrasted with an institutional model where schedule and staff convenience take precedence.

•           It is an environment that honors the culture of aging as life-affirming, satisfying, humane and meaningful.

•           The place has the feel and look of HOME. Just two evidences of change in the environment:
            No medical carts rumbling down the hallways.
            No centralized  nurses' station

Although the culture is not transformed by merely instituting programs, or doing away with a centralized nursing station, studies have shown that in communities where the culture has transformed to a resident-first culture, certain practices/programs are present. That information can be used as somewhat of an evaluation of how far along on the journey of culture change a community has come. It is accessible at this link:   http://www.artifactsofculturechange.org/ACCTool/  .

Once on that page, scroll down to the "Artifacts of Culture Change Downloadable Version".

Culture change is a deep, challenging transformation of attitudes and values which is dependent on strong, knowledgeable leadership. The leader must have a deep belief in these transformative values and the leadership ability to shape staff so that these values permeate every cell of their being. Anything short of this is not transformative change and the result will not be ‘culture change.’

The win-win part of culture change is that this transformative mode of operation costs no more than traditional, institutional care. In fact, there are many reasons why the cost is probably lower. That’s a topic for another day.

Steve Shields, CEO of a transformative community in Manhattan, KS speaks of what made it possible for him and his staff to move forward in their journey of transformative change. He is quoted in Beth Baker's book, Old Age in a New Age:  When Action Pact consultants first introduced the concepts of culture change, "The vision was painted so strongly and in front of everybody that it became holy. Truly."

I spoke with Steve about that quote and asked him what he meant by saying that culture change is ‘holy.’ He said simply and straightforwardly, “It is holy because it liberates our elders and returns hope to them.”