According to the Jacksonville Business Journal, an international senior living development company is building a senior living facility for people with Alzheimer’s disease, its first project in North Florida.

Sunrise Senior Living  plans to open the 65,000-square-foot facility this fall at 4870 Belfort Road next to St. Luke’s Hospital. The assisted living and Alzheimer’s care facility will be able to offer more than 90 residents a variety of amenities and services. Sunrise Senior Living operates about 450 facilities around the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, including eight others in Florida.

As many as 5.3 million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer’s. According to the Florida Alzheimer’s Research Center, the following is a list of early warning signs of Alzheimer’s disease. However, if someone has several of these symptoms, it does not mean they definitely have the disease. It does mean they should be evaluated by a medical specialist trained in memory disorders. The seven warning signs are:

1. Asking the same question over and over again
2. Repeating the same story, word for word, again and again
3. Forgetting how to cook, or how to make repairs or how to play cards- activities that were previously done with ease and regularity.
4. Losing one’s ability to pay bills or balance ones checkbook
5. Getting lost in familiar surroundings or misplacing household objects.
6. Neglecting to bathe, or wearing the same clothes over and over again, while insisting that they have taken a bath or that their clothes are still clean
7. Relying on somebody else, such as a spouse, to make decisions or answer questions they previously would have handled themselves.

There is no way to guarantee that you or your loved one will not get Alzheimer’s. However, many of the things that are good for your heart are also good for your brain. Quit smoking, get regular exercise, and eat foods such as fruits, vegetables, and fish. Avoid foods high in saturated fat or cholesterol. Other helpful lifestyle changes include keeping mentally active, staying socially involved with others, reducing stress, and wearing seatbelts and bicycle/motorcycle helmets.

If you are trying to select a Florida nursing home for yourself or a loved one, here is an information-packed website that you will want to check out – www.medicare.gov/NHcompare/Home.asp

This is the federal government’s Medicare website. One of the most useful tools they provide is their Nursing Home Compare database. This tool has a Five-Star Quality Rating System about every Medicare and Medicaid-certified nursing home in Florida and throughout the country. There are 677 Florida nursing homes in the database.

Here is a description of the rating system for nursing homes from the website:
The Five-Star Quality Rating System helps consumers, their families, and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily and to help identify areas about which you may want to ask questions.

The Nursing Home Compare Web site now features a quality rating system that gives each nursing home a rating of between 1 and 5 stars.  Nursing homes with 5 stars are considered to have much above average quality and nursing homes with 1 star are considered to have quality much below average.  There is one Overall 5-star rating for each nursing home, and a separate rating for each of the following three sources of information:

Health Inspections – The health inspection rating contains information from the last 3 years of onsite inspections, including both standard surveys and any complaint surveys.  This information is gathered by individuals who go onsite to the nursing home and follow a specific process to determine the extent to which a nursing home has met Medicare’s minimum quality requirements.  The most recent survey findings are weighted more than the prior two years.  More than 200,000 onsite reviews are used in the health inspection scoring nationally.

Staffing – The staffing rating has information about the number of hours of care on average provided to each resident each day by nursing staff.  This rating considers differences in the level of need of care of residents in different nursing homes.  For example, a nursing home with residents who had more severe needs would be expected to have more nursing staff than a nursing home where the resident needs were not as high.

Quality Measures (QMs) – The quality measure rating has information on 10 different physical and clinical measures for nursing home residents – for example, the prevalence of pressure sores or changes to resident’s mobility.  This information is collected by the nursing home for all residents.  The QMs offer information about how well nursing homes are caring for their residents’ physical and clinical needs.  More than 12 million assessments of the conditions of nursing home residents are used in the Five-Star rating system.

On the Web site people will be able to arrange the order of the nursing homes according to any of the three aspects above, as well as an overall quality rating based on those three sources of information.

This just makes me sick to my stomach. Yesterday police in Punta Gorda, in southwest Florida, arrested an employee of the Punta Gorda Elderly Care Center on charges of abuse and battery on a 76-year-old resident. Police say 58-year-old Letitia Calderwood was employed as a Certified Nursing  Assistant at the facility. According to police, an employee of the center reported Calderwood had requested the assistance of her and an additional employee in helping the resident who had fallen in a bathroom. Calderwood and the two other facility employees had difficulty helping the resident to her feet and reports say Calderwood subsequently kicked in her lower back while using a profanity. Once the resident was helped to her feet, Calderwood reportedly struck her in the face with an open hand.

Detectives say Calderwood admitted to kicking and striking the resident as originally reported. She reportedly stated that her actions were done out of frustration although she knew the patient was disabled and had limited ability to stand on her own. Calderwood was arrested and transported to the Charlotte County Jail.

Thank goodness the other employees of this facility immediately stepped forward to report this alleged abuse. If you are concerned that someone you know is being abused or neglected in a Florida senior living facility, you can report it to the Florida Department of Children and Families. On their website – http://www.dcf.state.fl.us/abuse/ – you will find detailed information about the Florida Abuse Program, and how to submit a claim via phone, fax or online.

Last week, my father fell while alone in the apartment of his continuing care retirement community. I am so thankful that he was wearing his “alert” necklace. He was able to push the button, which sent an emergency signal to the security staff in his senior living building. In a matter of minutes, they were in his apartment, helping him up off the floor. Thankfully, he was not seriously injured. A continuing care retirement facility means that while my father lives in a fully independent apartment, there is a nursing home on the same property. So in a situation such as this, one of the registered nurses from the nursing home was called to his apartment to evaluate him after the fall. This gives me great peace of mind, to know that he has access to a full medical staff 24/7. Otherwise, in this case, the security officer would have had to call an ambulance to transport him to a nearby hospital.

When you are evaluating a senior living facility, be sure to ask specific questions about the safety and security measures the facility offers. In my father’s case, each apartment comes equipped with an emergency pull-cord in the bathroom. But the “alert” necklace that he wears was an optional feature that we had to order through his maintenance department.

Have you or a loved one been helped by an “alert” necklace or other safety feature in a senior living facility? Share you comments below.

When I was younger, I used to read articles about the challenges faced by “The Sandwich Generation” – people trying to care for aging parents while supporting their own children at the same time. Even just a few years ago, that seemed like a foreign concept to me. My mom had passed away in 1989 from ovarian cancer. Her battle with the disease happened during my final year of college, so I never had the opportunity to truly take care of her.  My dad, now 84, has lived a fully independent and active senior lifestyle until recently. It was about 18 months ago, around his 83rd birthday,  that it became apparent that it was not in his best interest to live all alone in an apartment, without any built-in support system. Our family became concerned that he was not eating regular meals, he was not keeping up with necessary housework and, most importantly, he was not getting any social interaction.

It didn’t take much persuasion to get him to consider a move into some sort of Florida senior living facility near my home in Orlando. But finding the right senior facility in Florida - one that provided the amenities and atmosphere he wanted but that would respect his independence and dignity – that was a much bigger
challenge than I ever expected. Since he is still fairly independent, we knew he did not need a nursing home. My initial thought was an assisted living facility, but after visiting  a few I realized those types of Florida senior living facilities provide more care and less independence than he wanted. After educating myself about the  different types of senior living facilities that are available, I decided that he would do best in a continuing care retirement community – a property that provides different levels of care based on the needs of the individual.

As a former journalist, I pride myself of being able to quickly and thoroughly gather information on any given topic. So I was surprised and frustrated at my inability to find a comprehensive list of continuing care retirement communities in the Orlando area. I did find a few online, and a few in the phonebook. In the end, though, it was good old “word of mouth” that lead us to the continuing care retirement community he now lives in. That’s when I decided to develop a website that would offer a comprehensive database for a Florida senior living facility search.

Florida Senior Living Advisor is the culmination of nearly a year of brainstorming and research, with a healthy dose of fear and self-doubt mixed in. I sincerely hope that it will become a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning about senior living facilities across the state of Florida. I also hope to provide useful and timely information through this blog. This is most definitely a work in progress, so I encourage you to leave your comments here or send me an email at mitra@flseniorlivingadvisor.com.