In 1967, psychiatrists Holmes and Rahe created a scale that measures the stress levels of various life events, and found that people with stress levels over 300 are at high risk of illness. I’ve always considered a nursing home stay to be a very stressful experience, but applying the scale was illuminating. I took the Holmes and [...]

Complaint #3: The Patient Lift The patient lift is a machine used to transfer a resident from their bed to their wheelchair and back. No resident I’ve met likes using one, and I suspect the reason is the combination of loss of control, the frightening feeling of being suspended, helpless, in midair, and a lack of [...]

“I never say goodbye,” Mr. O’Hara told me, “because that’s what my mother said when she left me as a child. Then she died and I never saw her again.” At 91, Mr. O’Hara was slim and getting slimmer. He began our next session as usual, discussing the procedures he was receiving from the doctors [...]

Complaint #2: The Food Where is the Emeril of nursing home food? It’s time to kick things up a notch. There’s a huge opportunity for improvement in the quality, number of choices, and presentation of the food in nursing homes, and to affect the satisfaction of the residents with their meals. A good start is to increase [...]

I refer my residents to therapeutic activities every day. I consider them a vital adjunct to my work as a psychologist. Here’s why: Therapeutic recreation reverses the downward spiral of depression . There’s a theory that when we’re depressed, we stop doing the things we enjoy, thus leading to more depression. In order to become less depressed, we [...]

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ensures that the personal information of our nursing home residents stays personal, but sometimes it’s taken too far. Well-meaning staff members, not wanting to violate HIPAA, are unsure whether or not to share news of a resident’s death with their friends in the nursing home, so they [...]

By Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD A little over a year ago, I decided to stop coloring my hair ( Going Gray) . I’d started to feel uncomfortable hiding my silver while I was spending my days helping folks deal with growing older. I kept a box of fire red in the closet, though, just in case it was [...]

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: Reducing Agitation in Residents with Dementia Using Preferred Activities

by Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
Recent psychology research* showed reduced levels of agitation in nursing home residents with dementia, some to the point of not being considered agitated at all.
This promising study used a structured yes/no list to find the types of activities the residents found pleasurable either now or in the past, such as [...]

  3 months ago · View

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: It’s the Simple Things

by Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
When I arrived at Mr. Johnson’s room, he was sitting in the doorway in his wheelchair, frowning at the passersby. He was immaculately dressed, as usual, in a button-down shirt and shorts on this hot summer day, looking much younger than his 90 years.
Lately he’d been frustrated that his memory [...]

  3 months, 1 week ago · View

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: ElderApps for Nursing Home Residents

By Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
I recently saw a video showing a 99-year old woman reading and composing poetry on her new iPad, which brightened and enlarged the typeface enough that she could read again despite limited vision due to glaucoma. It got me thinking about apps our elders could use [...]

  3 months, 3 weeks ago · View

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: Video Calls for Nursing Home Residents

by Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
My hip 80-something mother-in-law uses Skype’s free video calls to view the family as she talks with them over the computer. I’d like to see video calls in nursing homes, either via a video phone or over the Internet in the resident computer room (what, your facility doesn’t have [...]

  4 months ago · View

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: Great iPhone Interventions for Nursing Home Residents

 By Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
Now that I know I’m not going against State regulations, I’ll confess I love to use my iPhone with the residents. In nursing homes that don’t yet have computer access, the iPhone and other web-enabled mobile devices bring the world right to the residents.
<img class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-1170″ title=”iphone” src=”http://nslpn.com/daily-dose/files/2010/04/iphone.jpg” alt=”iphone” width=”409″ [...]

  4 months, 1 week ago · View

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: 10 Great Reasons to Volunteer in a Nursing Home

 by Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
Volunteering in a nursing home can be a rewarding, life-changing experience for many people and for a variety of reasons, some of which I’ve posted below. Please add your thoughts in the Comments section.
 
For more on nursing home volunteers, see my earlier [...]

  4 months, 3 weeks ago · View

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: “Transfer Package” Helps Make the Most of Stroke Rehabilitation

By Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
There’s an interesting article about stroke rehabilitation by Tori DeAngelis in the March 2010 issue of the Monitor on Psychology. In “New help for stroke survivors,” she writes about research showing that a “transfer package” is an essential component in maintaining the gains of [...]

  4 months, 4 weeks ago · View

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: Discussing the Passage of the Health Care Reform Bill with People of Age

By Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
I asked nursing home residents, or “people of age,” as one resident cleverly put it, about their reaction to the passage of the health care reform bill.

They were unanimously in support of the bill, though a few voiced concern about whether [...]

  5 months, 2 weeks ago · View

Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD wrote a new blog post: Dr. El Goes Undercover with the NYS Department of Health

by Eleanor Feldman Barbera, PhD
Okay, so it didn’t involve a disguise, but did I make an anonymous phone call to the New York State Department of Health.
When I interviewed Mark Kissinger, their Deputy Commissioner of Long Term Care recently, he and Jacqueline Pappalardi, the Director of the Division of Residential Services, were [...]

  6 months ago · View