NETTING IT OUT

Dr. Allan Teel’s book, Alone and Invisible No More: How Grassroots Community Action and 21st Century Technologies Can Empower Elders to Stay in Their Homes and Lead Healthier, Happier Lives, is a must read for anyone who cares about their parents and about their own quality of life. Dr. “Chip” Teel has been co-designing better living arrangements with his elderly patients for 25 years in midcoast Maine. Solutions have run the gamut from nursing homes to assisted-living facilities to co-ops to the current model, which is preferred by his clients and is the least expensive of all: let people age gracefully in their own homes.

“The Maine Way”—a combination of high-tech monitoring, high-touch outreach, and elder volunteerism—was co-designed by a group of several hundred elderly people who participated in shaping and evolving this program.

It is also a great example of “smart customization.” The services delivered are tailored for each individual and evolved over time to meet their changing needs. One reason for the flexibility in tailoring is that each service component is a well-designed element in a mix-and-match framework.

What’s revolutionary about this approach? It runs completely counter to the prevailing wisdom that to be safe and enjoy a good quality of life, older people should reside in high-quality assisted-living arrangements or in retirement communities or nursing homes. Chip Teel has discovered that, not only can very few people actually afford to live in these kinds of facilities, they almost all would prefer to stay in the comfort of their own homes, surrounded by their possessions, memories, and neighbors. The other part of Teel’s successful and well-proven formula that he learned from his clients is that the majority of older people find meaning in helping others. They are eager to volunteer—and the more volunteering they do, the happier they are.

Elder-to-Elder volunteerism as well as multi-generational volunteers are what make Full Circle America work.

This book describes Chip Teel’s journey of discovery from growing up around loving grandparents to becoming a family practice physician with a specialty in geriatrics in a rural coastal community in Maine. It traces his career in eldercare from being director of a nursing home, to being medical director of an assisted-living facility, to establishing his own cooperative elder homes, to designing what Teel calls “The Maine Way” of empowering elders to live in their homes and support one another. This program has now become “The Full Circle America” approach and it is spreading across the country.

Dr. Allan “Chip” Teelis the family care practitioner who has co-designed a new approach to “Virtual Assisted Living” with his elderly patients. His “empowered aging” approach relies on technology and volunteers—including the elderly themselves to provide affordable live at home solutions for the elderly and infirm.

WHY IS ELDERCARE IN AMERICA SUCH A DIFFICULT PROBLEM?

We Are Nearing the Gray Tsunami; We Can’t Build Enough Institutions!

Until I read this book, although I knew that the baby boom was creating a huge bubble in aging demographics, I didn’t realize that there’s actually no way to house and care for all of us baby boomers as we age. I somehow thought that all of these retirement communities that are springing up (and that my 96-year old mom currently lives in) were the “answer.” Not so, says Dr. Teel. Here are some of his sobering statistics...

(Download the PDF to read the entire article.)