Finding Answers

“Educate, coordinate, and facilitate”—that’s what Aging with Grace workers do. Educate people on their options, coordinate their care, and help make it happen. Patricia Grace’s hope is that her company can help people “along the entire continuum of care.” She’ll try to find the correct provider for the specific situation, since “not all providers provide the same level of service.”

But she also cautions that people’s expectations may not be realistic when it comes to elder housing. “People look at assisted living and think dad can ring a buzzer and a nurse . . . will sweep into the room and ask, ‘What can I get you today?’” she said. “So we spend a great deal of time educating people on what they can expect.”

Families sometimes get hostile when a facility recommends that a parent move to the next level of care. “If dad has dementia and is wandering . . . he’ll be recommended to the dementia unit. But families fight that tooth and nail,” she said. “When that facility recommends your parent has to move to the next level (where care is more appropriate), you have to listen to that. Families don’t want to do that.” So she will work to help them understand why that person has to move.

It’s the “stigma attached,” she says, the perception, that causes the resistance. “They don’t want mom to be in the dementia care unit. . . . When we start to peel back the layers and ask more questions, it’s not always that the parent is so adamant about not moving, it’s the adult child who’s adamant about not moving. So you’re dealing with a tremendous amount of dynamics.”