India’s news: Country First International Spark of Life Master Practitioner in Dementia Care

India’s first International Spark of Life Master Practitioner in Dementia Care

Congratulations to Ms. Nilanjana Maulik (National Coordinator Working Group ARDSI) and Mr. Sailesh Mishra (Founder President Silver Innings Group and A1Snehanjali ) for being First Indian to be conferred renowned 'Spark of Life' International Master Practitioner in Dementia Care at Perth, Australia on 19th May 2017.

Mr Sailesh Mishra is Mumbai’s first International Spark of Life Master Practitioner and Ms. Nilanjana Maulik is Kolkata city’s first International Spark of Life Master Practitioner.

Mr Mishra has just returned back to India after undertaking a 3 week intensive master course in Perth, Western Australia on the Spark of Life Philosophy.

‘The Spark of Life International Master Course, its magnificent holistic philosophy for Dementia Care, has not only enriched me but also empowered me about dementia care and to be better human being’, Mr Mishra said on his return.

The Spark of Life Philosophy
‘The Spark of Life Philosophy offers a practical and sustainable way of enriching the lives of people with dementia, their families and carers and transforming the culture of care. The focus is on How to connect, How to communicate and How to care.

The philosophy is about the quality of the connection between the carer and the person with dementia and aims at fostering kindness, compassion, empathy, respect and an attitude of unconditional love in the interactions between families or care staff and clients,’ Mr Mishra explained.

Implementing the Spark of Life Philosophy into an organisational culture has been proven to enrich the lives of people with dementia enabling them to experience improvements in mental abilities, language, self-esteem, social interactions and emotional well-being.
For information on the international Spark of Life Master Course for pioneering leaders held in Perth Western Australia please go to www.dementiacareaustralia.com


About Mr Sailesh Mishra
Sailesh is a Social Entrepreneur and a renowned Social Activist working for the welfare of Senior Citizens and People with Dementia. He is also a certified Spark of Life Master Practitioner.

After 15 years of working in the corporate world in marketing he made a complete shift to dedicating his life to creating an Elder Friendly World where Ageing becomes a Positive and Rewarding Experience and in April 2008 Sailesh founded his organization Silver Innings to achieve just that. For his selfless in Ageing he has been awarded Karmaveer Puraskaar National award.

Sailesh has been part of National and State level prominent TV Talk show on Ageing and Dementia, he was also twice part of International Radio talk show on Dementia.

He has been to Malta twice on scholarship for UN INIA 15 day’s course on Social Gerontology and International Policy and Participated in Prestigious UN OEWG on Ageing at New York.

In Aug 2013 Sailesh set up Mumbai City’s first 24 x 7 Dedicated Assisted Living Elder Care Home 'A1 Snehanjali' in Nalasopara West and in 2016 the second home  'A1 Snehanjali' in Virar.


About: Mrs. Nilanjana Maulik
Mrs. Nilanjana Maulik is Secretary of Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India (ARDSI) Kolkata Chapter & National Coordinator, Working Group ARDSI. She has done her Master's Degree, Dementia Studies from The University of Stirling, and  Successful Aging & End of Life Care from Stanford University School of Medicine Mini Fellowship, she is also Board Member of Commonwealth Association of Aging.

Mrs. Nilanjana Maulik since 1999 is involved with ARDSI and is instrumental in starting Kolkata city’s first Dementia Day care center and also runs counselling, care support, memory clinic, training for home carers, home visit, day care for dementia person, etc, and  helpline. She is strong advocate of rights and care of person with dementia.

She has won National Award Winner ARDSI: BEST DEMENTIA CARE WORKER, 2006



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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights. Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

Silver Innings, a social enterprise celebrates it's 6th Foundation Day

 MUMBAI , INDIA / NGO / APRIL 10TH 2014  

 

“A change agent is someone who has an inner flame  pushing them out into the world to improve it. My work at the Silver Innings is to feed that flame so it grows into a bonfire. My hope is that each person’s flame will grow to be so bright that one day we will create Elder Friendly World where Ageing becomes a Positive and Rewarding Experience”  

: Sailesh Mishra , Founder President, Silver Innings   

Today 10th April 2014 on our Foundation Day, its an amazing experience, completing 6 Years, Silver Innings has become a movement, a trend setter with its uniqueness and innovative Positive approach towards Ageing. 

We take this opportunity to Thank all our supporters, well wishers , colleagues , friends , partners and all Elders for their continuous support and blessings. 

We still remember that day, 10th April 2008, our Social Enterprise organization 'Silver Innings' was launched with website www.silverinnings.com to work With Senior Citizens to provide need base service to Senior Citizens and their family members.

The idea behind Silver innings was to take the fear out of ageing by empowering the elders and bringing dignity in their lives Who’s afraid of ageing? Is what the team at Silver Innings believes in. 

Silver Innings was born with idea of a new beginning for our elders. It is a new path, the journey of successful ageing. It is an initiative that was started by my young change-makers team , Hendi Lingiah, (France), Prof Parul Kibliwala (India,SNDT) Bhavesh Chheda (Web designer,India) and Sailesh Mishra(Marketing Professional, India)  who were far removed in distance but united in the cause of elders. 

The idea was germinated by our founder Sailesh Mishra and took root with the support and contribution of these individuals and many more people, to list them all will be an endless list. Silver Innings took form as a one stop destination for dissemination of information and resources for the elders and their family members. The social enterprise opened a platform for discussing issues regarding the elders and soon a need for a social organisation emerged. Taking on this gaping need, Silver Inning Foundation a NGO was born in July 2008 to address  the micro and macro level issues of the elderly to create an elder friendly world.

Silver Innings had taken a bold and innovative step to address the issues concerning elders with the help of technology by proactively using ICT in creating awareness and sensitization. It believes in partnerships and networking and uses various platforms, NGOs, educational institutes, medical institutes to promote the cause. It is trying to break the centralised system by reaching out to the elderly where they are situated and empowering them to find resources within them to deal with the issues.

Silver Innings believes in creating an environment and understanding of ageing as a positive and beautiful experience with no negativity attached to it.  A few organisations in recent years were addressing some of the issues of the elderly. However there was a need for better marketing of the issues of the elderly with proactive participation, networking and advocacy towards the cause. A non-discriminatory, approach was needed since most of the organisation working for elder care were addressing the elites on the one hand and the down trodden on the other but the middle class was somehow left out of this outreach. 

Silver Innings has a vision that after 20 / 30 years Silver Inning Foundation (SIF) , NGO will ceases to operate, elders won’t any more need any NGO’s and we believes that NGO’s should not survive on stakeholders.There will be only service and product providers.That's why Silver Innings is working towards creating Elder Friendly World where Ageing becomes a Positive and Rewarding Experience. Now its like monopoly of handful organisations but it should be consumer driven market. A social innovation and Social Entrepreneur module will make huge difference to other wise most neglected and ignored sector of Senior Citizens globally. 

Our Sixth year 2013-14 was an Interesting year with lots of ups and down , but with limited funds and human resources we could still make some difference with events like Lectures , Workshop, Training, World days events, Heath  camps,  Advocacy , Participation in national and international conference's and also with some concrete New Initiative such as : 

Silver Innings Matrimonial & Companionship, A match making bureau for senior citizens, launched in April 2013

Silver Innings FC ( Foot ball club of youths playing for cause  of Elders)  we won all the matches in Div III group E , we were the topper , launched in July 2013

A1 Snehanjali, Assisted living elder care home (for Alzheimer's, Dementia, Parkinson and Very old) , one of its kind in Mumbai city ( Nalasopara west) , Launched in Aug 2013

Koffee with Kahani, launched in Dec 2013 with ‘The Metrognome’ a  Inter-generation programme promoting story telling 

'Silver Innings' Registered as Trade Mark 

16 vs 60 Cricket match (between Youths and Senior Citizens)  launched in Jan 2014, Inter-generation programme with sports 

Silver Innings Helpline, India’s first online helpline portal only for Senior Citizens , Launched in Feb 2014, a brain child of Ramaa Subramanium, co founder 

Our work was also appreciated when our founder Sailesh Mishra was Awarded with Rotary Club Award , Dec 2013.

It was one of the important milestone with Book Launch of  ‘Karma Kurry for the mind, body, heart and soul’ in Dec 2013 Book published by Jaico with ‘Son of Million Parents’ our founder Sailesh Mishra change maker story.

We also got covered in many media, print in English and local languages  but one of the important one, to be mentioned is Electronic Media Interview of our Founder Sailesh Mishra regarding Old Age Homes and Senior Citizens issues at World Islamic Network's WIN TV 'Haqeeqat  Telecast on 13th April 2013. 

  

Doing all this we never realized when we had reached out to one million people globally.  

Some real time Statics will give you an idea of our proactive online activity, being pioneer in Asia using social media as tool for cause of aging :

Silver Innings (SI) Group Outreach  Reach Out , as on  9th April  2014                                          

           

Website and Publications:

                                                           

Websites :   Total Hits 1,71,187                                                         

www.silverinnings.com  :  1,10,765 hit  (since April 2008 )                                                 

http://a1snehanjali.com/  :  3841 hits  (since Dec 2013)                                                         

http://silverinningshelpline.com/  : 2581 (since 16th Feb 2014)                                                         

http://silverinningfoundation.org/   :  Under Construction                                                    

                                               

Blogs:   Total Hits  2,66,512                                                  

People for Social Cause Blog: 1,32,190 (since July 2007 )                                                   

Silver Innings blog :1,04,813 hit (Since April 2008 )                                                

Alzheimer’s Society (ARDSI), Greater Mumbai Blog: 17,996 hit   (Since Jan 2011)  - Managed by SI

Missing Senior Citizen Alert Blog9,754 Hit ( Since 25th Nov 2011)

Silver Innings Matrimonial and Companionship :  1759  ( April 2013)    

Acquired Blog:                                                     

Seniors World Chronicle  10,78,372 Hits (acquired on 8th May 2012)                                                        

                                   

Social Media:                           

Total Followers/ Friends : 8093                                                         

Facebook :6000 Followers/Friends (including personal)                                           

Twitter            :2093 Followers          (Including Personal)                           

                                                           

Facebook Pages / Community : Total Likes 3109                                                     

Youth for Seniors: 579 (Since July 2010)                              

Silver Inning Foundation: 439 (April 2008)                          

Silver Innings Matrimonial & Companionship: 109 (April 2013)                              

Silver Innings: 604 ( April 2008)                               

Silver Innings Young at Heart (Talent): 77 (Since 1st March 2014)             

World Elder Abuse Awareness Day: 232 (Since 2010)                                

The International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (INPEA): 532 (since 2011)  Managed by SI  A1 Snehanjali: 285 (since July 2013)

Silver Innings Dementia Management Services(SIDMS): 91 (since April 2012)      

Silver Innings FC : 51 (Since July 2013)                               

Celebrating Age (Event):  110 (Since 2012)                          

           

Facebook Groups : Total Members  2559                                          

Missing Senior Citizen Alert: 700                              

Alzheimer's Related Disorder Society of India (ARDSI): 975 Managed by SI       

World Elder Abuse Awareness Day: 460                              

Senior Citizens National Solidarity Day 16th Aug: 354 Managed by SI      

Online Newspaper:                                                    

Silver Innings Newspaper (Paper li ):  77 subscriber                         

Dementia & Alzheimer's Times :  83 Subscriber        

Total Outreach For Social Media including Websites and blogs:   13,95,670 - 9th April 2014                    

                                                           

Silver Innings Members : 5000  ( since April 2008 )    

                                             

Meri News.com - Citizen Journalism  : 36 Article published : 72,000 hits (5 years)           

                                      

Reach Out  / Impact :                                                  

Indirect: 10, 00,000 plus people globally (through ICT - internet) since April 2008       

                             

Direct: approx  1,00,000 people in India since April 2008    

                                               

Yes we all are the Change to make this society for all Ages.

From 

Team Silver Innings

silverinnings@gmail.com 

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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights. Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

USA: Discovering The True Cost Of At-Home Caregiving

NEW HAMPSHIRE, USA / New Hampshire Radio /  Business / May 1, 2012

By NPR PEOPLE: MARILYN GEEWAX

Walk through any nursing home, and your first thought might be: "I need to take care of Mom myself."

Few people want to turn over a loved one to institutional care. No matter how good the nursing home, it may seem cold and impersonal — and very expensive. But making the choice to provide care yourself is fraught with financial risks and personal sacrifices.

Those who become full-time caregivers often look back and wish they had taken the time to better understand the financial position they would be getting themselves into.

Ida Christian gets help from her granddaughter, Yolanda Hunter (left), in
blowing out the candles on the cake celebrating her 89th birthday.

Kainaz Amaria / NPR

"I used to hear about people saying, 'Oh you know, we've got to put our parents in a home; we can't deal with it anymore,' " said Yolanda Hunter, 43, a Maryland resident who is struggling with her decision to drop out of the human resources field to become a full-time caregiver for her grandmother. "And I used to think: 'Oh, how cruel are you?'

"You know, but now? I understand," she said.

Hunter belongs to one of three families being profiled in NPR's eight-week series,Family Matters: The Money Squeeze, which airs each Tuesday on Morning Edition. Each family is struggling with how to afford care for an older generation. The do-it-yourself approach is both common and costly.

Caregiver advocacy groups say Congress needs to be doing more with tax credits and Social Security benefits to help financially support those who choose to care for the elderly.

Read more

©2012 New Hampshire Public Radio

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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights. 
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

CHINA: Secom to build luxury nursing homes for elderly in China

OSAKA, Japan / The Daily Yomiuri / Business / April 19, 2012

Jiji Press

Major Japanese security company Secom Co. said Wednesday it will launch a luxury nursing home business in China in partnership with a local real estate developer.

Secom Medical System Co., a Secom subsidiary, will set up a joint venture with Shanghai Lujiazui Finance & Trade Zone Development Co. The business will operate from 2015 in Shanghai, which has a large population of elderly people.

It will be the first elderly care facility operated by Secom in China.

Secom intends to create similar facilities in 18 Chinese cities, including Beijing and Guangzhou, where the company operates a security business for corporate clients.

The new company will be established with capital ranging from 100 million yen to 2 billion yen, of which at least 70 percent will be shouldered by Secom Medical System and the rest by the Shanghai-based partner.

© The Yomiuri Shimbun.
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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights. 
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

INDIA: A fragile India, handled with care

MUMBAI, Maharashtra / Daily News & Analysis / Lifestyle / April 15, 2012

By Shreevatsa Nevatia

Shraddha Bhargava/DNA

Not everyone is fortunate enough to be cared for, and not everyone witnesses the manifestations of this truth quite as often as Mona Mishra. Mishra is an administrative officer with Silver Innings, an initiative to help improve the lives of senior citizens by providing care and advocacy, by facilitating workshops and through services such as dementia management. Mishra also works as a counsellor in the organisation, and in some cases, a care-giver.

For reasons of confidentiality, she chooses not to disclose the name of a successful writer who has now settled in the West, but starts by talking about his mother who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years ago. “When I went in, all I found was a woman with a single question — ‘I had spent most of my life looking after him, where is he when I need him most?’ For four months, we just made either eye or hand contact, and then came a day when I had to perform an enema on her. She was embarrassed, but that broke the ice.” In the years that have followed, Mishra’s relationship with the 80-year-old have deepened to an extent that she is keenly aware of its implications.

“There are, of course, times when she considers me to be a substitute for her son.” And then with a wide grin, she adds, “Do you know what makes me really happy though? Taking this lady from her old-age home to a beauty parlour. You should see her face after a manicure and pedicure. It’s priceless.”

There have been times when Mishra has said ‘enough’. She remembers calling a son after his mother had passed away, asking if he’d return for her last rites. “He asked me to do the needful and inform him of the expenses. I came very close to depression around then.” Unlike much of the West, where the social services are now an accepted interventionist tool and where carers are a professionalised workforce unto themselves, the issues surrounding care, more specifically care-givers in India, are little known.

Mishra talks about the different roles she has to play in her varied capacities. “The senior citizens who I meet ... I have to mail their children every week. In some cases, its emotional support that I need to provide, but in other cases its things like looking after diet charts and hygiene. And when I goto the slums, it’s even more basic ... getting them to use toothpaste and getting them to keep their homes clean.”

NOW ON LIFE SUPPORT
It is perhaps difficult to find a better representation of care being administered amongst the disadvantaged than in the offices of Jeevan Aadhar Seva Sanstha (JASS) in Khar. The organisation works with the destitute and the homeless in Mumbai. Sandip P Purab, JASS’ secretary, says, “We started with wanting to care for those who were in desperate need of life support. We find people on the streets, bathe them, take them to a hospital, and rehabilitate them.

” Working on the street, adds Purab, is not that easy a task. “You don’t get that much support from the police and you get no support from the people.” With this, Purab begins to play some video clips of the work JASS has done. He can be seen hunched over a man’s leg on a pavement, cleaning an open gash of a wound swarmed with maggots. The question seems obvious. What compels him to do what he does? “Just want to sleep well at night,” he quips.

The JASS office is a rented mezzanine with a tin roof. On the other side of green curtains are three beds that together double as a makeshift ward. Michael D’Souza is 65, and was between drug habits when he ended up near Victoria Terminus. After being brought in by JASS and nursed back to health, he says, “I survived.

That’s why this institution works.” Ever since JASS was founded in 2007, it has largely been provided for by the fund-raising capacities of Sandip Purab. “We never went to the government,” he says. But Purab does confess that models of self-sufficiency do come with their limitations and that he himself has had to feel the pinch.

DOING IT RIGHT
Dr Leena Gangolli, a family physician and a public health consultant, has found herself associated with varied aspects of care. First through home and health care for the elderly, and then with projects that deal with palliative care, situations where patients and their families have to cope with the ramifications of a life-limiting diagnosis.

Making the case that the government’s responsibility must exceed beyond its budgetary allocations and extend to providing palliative care for children and the youth, she refers to the Constitution and points to the safeguarded rights to equality (article 14) and life (article 21). She says,"The government needs to understand that unlike building infrastructure like highways and sea-links which require raw materials and equipment, delivery of care requires people as the main raw material. Human resource is our biggest advantage ... there is no dearth of people in India who could be trained to deliver such care."

A need for a greater strengthening of care in the palliative sector was also reiterated at the Tata Memorial Centre, where associate professor Dr Manjiri Dighe works in the Department of Palliative Medicine. According to her, “There is a large demand coming from the families of patients who are dying, and from doctors like oncologists. But have a look at the number of specialised physicians in the state. There are maybe 10 or 15, just these small islands of care. And that is far from optimal. Far from what you’d get to see in places like the UK.”

A LEAP OF FAITH
Most of the patients that come to the Tata Memorial are impoverished. Fifty-year-old Priya Ubale is a housekeeper and waste activist who has now been volunteering with the hospital for the last four years. After all this time, she says, “You stop believing in God when you begin to realise that the blight isn’t cancer, it’s poverty.” Questions of faith often surface at the Bhakti Vedanta hospital, where Dr Vineeta Sharma has been part of the Department of Palliative Care since 2008.

Though the hospital was formed and runs on the principles of the Krishna-worshipping ISCKON community, religiosity is never an essential component of care, informs Dr Sharma. She says, “It is patient-oriented. There are those who don’t want to talk about God. Then there are those who do.” Narayan Shetty, 75, seems to belong to the latter category. Suffering from liver cancer, he says he only feels fear when the pain in his body becomes 
excessive. It is at points like those, he says, while pointing to devotional literature he has borrowed from Dr Sharma, “do the doctor and these books help in forgetting.”

Niranjan Parikh and Narayan Shetty are both of the same age. For a large part of the last twenty-five years, however, Parikh has dedicated an early retirement to working with children, cancer patients, those with brain tumours and those in need of palliative care. There are several stories that the counsellor at Tata Memorial can recount. A girl being as dismissive of an amputation as she would have been of a lost plaything. A terminally ill teenager drawing a girl with a balloon and writing ‘life is an ice-cream’ below it. Doesn’t any of this rattle Parikh himself into feeling a certain fear? He comes closer and says, “Not for a minute. It is absolutely inevitable. What will I tell the people I counsel, if I’m scared of death myself.” If there’s one thing that Parikh says he wants to prove about care-giving in India, it’s simply this — “it’s never too late to start”.

©2012 Diligent Media Corporation Ltd.

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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights. 
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

USA: For the Elderly, Emergency Rooms of Their Own

NEW YORK, NY / The New York Times / New York Region / April 10, 2012

A simulated skylight in the new geriatric emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital is intended to help patients with end-of-the-day agitation and confusion. Yana Paskova for The New York Times

By Anemona Hartocollis

Phyllis Spielberger, a retired hat seller at Bendel’s, picked at a plastic dish of beets and corn as her husband, Jason, sat at the foot of her hospital bed, telling her to eat.

Although she had been rushed to Manhattan’s busy Mount Sinai Hospital by ambulance when her leg gave out, the atmosphere she encountered upon her arrival was eerily calm.

There were no beeping machines or blinking lights or scurrying medical residents. A volunteer circulated among the patients like a flight attendant, making soothing conversation and offering reading glasses, Sudoku puzzles and hearing aids. Above them, an artificial sun shined through a skylight imprinted with a photographic rendering of a robin’s-egg-blue sky, puffy clouds and leafy trees.

Ms. Spielberger, who is in her 80s, was even getting into the spirit of the place, despite her unnerving condition. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Everything here is wonderful.”

Yet this was an emergency room, one specifically designed for the elderly, part of a growing trend of hospitals’ trying to cater to the medical needs and sensibilities of aging baby boomers and their parents. Mount Sinai opened its geriatric emergency department, or geri-ed, two months ago, modeling it in part after one at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., which opened in 2009.

Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Md., opened one of the first geriatric emergency departments, which it calls a seniors emergency center, in 2008, and its parent organization, Trinity Health System, runs 12 nationwide, primarily in the Midwest, and plans to open six or seven more by June, a spokeswoman said.

Dr. Mark Rosenberg, chairman of emergency medicine at St. Joseph’s, said he had consulted on more than 50 geriatric emergency rooms to be opened across the country, from Princeton, N.J., to California, overcoming initial resistance from doctors and nurses who saw assignments to the units as scut work.

“They thought it was a bedpan unit, focused on nursing home patients,” Dr. Rosenberg said. “When they finally realized this was the unit that gave better health care to their parents and grandparents, they jumped onboard.”

Hospitals also have strong financial incentives to focus on the elderly. People over 65 account for 15 percent to 20 percent of emergency room visits, hospital officials say, and that number is expected to grow as the population ages.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance overhaul passed by Congress in 2010, hospitals’ Medicare payments will be tied to scores on patient satisfaction surveys and how frequently patients have to be readmitted to the hospital. (The Supreme Court is considering whether to overturn another section of the law, and if it does, whether it would have to throw out the entire law.)

Pertrilla Henry watching an iPad, which can be used
to communicate with nurses. Yana Paskova/NYT

Even in their early stages, patient satisfaction ratings for Mount Sinai’s geri-ed are “off the scoreboard,” said Dr. Andy Jagoda, the hospital’s chairman of emergency medicine.

Patients who are picked up by ambulance can choose which hospital to go to, if circumstances and travel time allow.

At Mount Sinai, all arrivals go through triage in the regular emergency department and are sent to the geriatric department if they are over 65, know their name, were able to walk before the day of the hospital visit and are ranked 3, 4 or 5 on a standard emergency severity index of 1 to 5, with 1 being the sickest. Someone with a broken hip would probably qualify, but someone with an acute heart attack would most likely have to be stabilized in the regular emergency room first, said Dr. Kevin M. Baumlin, the vice chairman of emergency medicine, who founded the geriatric emergency room.

The geriatric E.R. — eight beds and six examining rooms — resembles a clinic more than it does an emergency room: there are nonskid floors, rails along the walls, reclining chairs for patients and thicker mattresses to reduce bedsores. To keep the noise down, the curtain rings and rods around the beds are made of plastic instead of metal.

“One of my pet peeves is the noise that curtains make,” Dr. Baumlin said. “You know, that metal clackety-clack sound.”   Continue reading...

© 2012 The New York Times Company
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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights. 
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

UK: Failure to treat elderly cancer sufferers 'is costing 14,000 lives each year'

LONDON, England / The Daily Mail / Health / March 25, 2012


By Sophie Borland

Scandal: Britain has one of the worst cancer survival rates in the Western world
because elderly patients are too easily ruled out for surgery. (Posed by models)

Up to 40 elderly cancer sufferers are dying needlessly every day because they are being denied the best treatments, a damning report warns.

Patients over the age of 70 are routinely being ‘written off’ by doctors who assume they are too frail for surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Such discrimination has led to Britain having one of the worst cancer survival rates in the Western world, according to Macmillan Cancer Support.

The charity estimates that if the treatment of older patients matched that on offer in the U.S., as many as 14,000 lives could be saved every year.

Ciaran Devane, chief executive of Macmillan, described it as an ‘unacceptable act of discrimination’.

In the report, he points out that while cancer rates are vastly improving across most age groups, they have actually worsened in patients aged 85 and above.

And despite major advances in diagnosis and treatment, the survival chances for patients over the age of 75 have only increased by a fraction.

Mr Devane said: ‘Writing people off as too old for treatment is utterly shameful. We have a moral duty to treat people as individuals and give them the best chance of beating cancer, regardless of their age.

‘The NHS and social care providers must wake up to the specific issues older people face and ensure treatment decisions are based on their overall health, not just their date of birth.’

The report warns that many doctors are wary of offering elderly patients surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy as they are more likely to suffer debilitating side effects, including sickness and extreme tiredness.

The body is also more prone to infection which can cause death.

While cancer survival rates have improved for
most other age groups, they have actually
worsened for those aged over 85.

Many doctors are also often worried about putting patients forward for treatment if they have illnesses such as dementia and diabetes in case their drugs or the condition itself causes complications.

But the report urges doctors to look at patients’ health and physical fitness rather than their date of birth.

It points out that while one 78-year-old may be bed-bound, another might be running half-marathons.

Figures cited in the report show that only 36 per cent of cancer patients in England over the age of 75 are likely to survive their illness.

This compares with 49 per cent in Sweden, 45 per cent in Germany and 40 per cent across Europe as a whole.

The most recent figures show that between 1995-97 and 2003-05, cancer mortality rates dropped by 17 per cent for those under 75.

By contrast, they fell by only 6 per cent in the 75-84 age group and they actually increased by 2 per cent among the over-85s.

Professor Riccardo Audisio, a breast cancer surgeon at St Helens Hospital in the Wirral, admitted: ‘We have huge evidence of under-treatment for these patients.

‘It is despicable to neglect, not to offer, not to even go near to the best treatment option only on the simple basis of the patient’s age. This has been a horrible mistake that, particularly in the UK, we have suffered from.’

Last year, research found that only 54 per cent of breast cancer patients over 70 were given surgery compared with 85 per cent of younger patients.

Copyright by Associated Newspapers Ltd
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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights. 
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

USA: Hospitalized seniors may have an increased risk of subsequent cognitive decline

BALTIMORE, MD / ABC2NEWS.com / Health / March 21, 2012

Important information for anyone who has to care for an elderly loved one.

Getty Images

Repeated hospital stays may come with a price.

A study in the journal Neurology finds those stays may take a toll on elderly minds.

Researchers studied a group of elderly people over several years.

Most of them stayed in the hospital at least once during that period.

After just one stay, patients performed poorly on cognitive tests.

Each time they were in the hospital, it seemed to speed up a patient's mental decline.

Copyright 2012 Scripps Media, Inc.

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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights. 
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.