MA SNF TO CATER TO LGBT ELDERS & FOLLOW EDEN MODEL

Barry Berman, executive director of the Chelsea Jewish Nursing Home Foundation, is working to provide a new model for the care of LGBT elders that could end the days when LGBT people who enter nursing homes feel pressured to go back into the closet. The foundation is currently engaged in a capital campaign for the construction of the Leonard P. Florence Center for Living, a nursing facility slated for construction on Chelsea’s Admiral’s Hill consisting of 10 "houses," semi-autonomous residential centers that will provide specialized care to different types of elder populations. One of those houses, the Elsie Frank House, will focus on addressing the needs of LGBT elders. One house will focus on residents with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and another will focus on people living with multiple sclerosis.

The Florence Center is designed to be a "Green House," a model for elder care facilities designed by the Texas non-profit Eden Alternative that emphasizes smaller, social, homey settings for elders rather than large hospital-like nursing homes. Berman said the idea behind a Green House is to break from the institutional feel of a nursing home and create a space that works to meet the needs of residents as individuals. He said at most mainstream nursing homes, including the Chelsea Jewish Nursing Home, a 123-bed facility, residents’ daily routines must conform to the institution’s schedule.

"Someone’s routine in a nursing home today is everyone, whether they’re ready or not, have to be in the dining room at 8 o’clock…You have nurses’ aides going into resident rooms starting at 6:30 in the morning waking these folks up because the food truck is coming up at 8 o’clock and you have to be in that dining room.” By contrast, the Florence Center houses will each have their own kitchen facilities, giving staff the flexibility to prepare meals on a schedule of the residents’ choosing. While most nursing home residents share bedrooms, each resident will have their own bedroom and bathroom. Instead of a sterile corridor with a nurse’s station, each of the rooms will open onto a common living and dining area designed to feel more inviting than the typical nursing home common room.

Each house will occupy half a floor of the proposed five-story facility. Berman’s group reached out to the Aging Project in Jamaica Plain and New York’s Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Elders (SAGE). Both organizations signed on to consult with the Florence Center to help make the Elsie Frank House a culturally competent facility for LGBT elders.

Lisa Krinsky, director of the LGBT Aging Project, said that in traditional nursing homes, many LGBT elders feel pressured to go back into the closet. Most nursing home residents share a bedroom, and Krinsky said LGBT elders often worry that their roommate or other residents of the nursing home may not be LGBT-friendly. They may also worry that nurses and other staff, people they depend on for care, may harbor anti-LGBT sentiments. "For some folks there’s a real sense that that is going to jeopardize my being here, and so they find themselves going back into the closet," said Krinsky.

Although there will be no requirement that residents of the house be LGBT-identified, the house will focus around the specific needs of LGBT residents, and all of the staff will be trained in meeting those needs. Berman said people living in the facility will feel comfortable decorating their rooms with photos of their loved ones and friends, reading LGBT-themed books and magazines, and watching LGBT-themed movies.

The Elsie Frank House is named after the longtime elder advocate, and mother of Congressman Barney Frank, who co-founded the Committee to End Elder Homelessness and served for more than a decade as president of the Massachusetts Association of Older Americans. The Florence Center is named after the late Boston-area philanthropist Leonard Florence.

Berman said groundbreaking on the facility could happen as early as the end of this year, and the construction process is likely to take 14 months. "… we expect 85 percent of the folks who live there will be on welfare, MassHealth ... The only way we can offer a beautiful product to [this] 85 percent … is to not have any debt, or have very little debt."

For more information on the Chelsea Jewish Nursing Home Foundation go to http://www.chelseajewish.org/. For more information on the Eden Alternative see: http://www.edenalt.org/

-From: “MA nursing home to cater to LGBT elders“, Bay Windows, Thursday Jul 5, 2007; cited in: The M&A Weekly, Margolis & Associates, July 30, 2007.

07/07