Gov. Jim Justice has declared May 2024 Older Americans Month in West Virginia, aiming to honor older adults’ contributions to society and raise awareness of senior services.
In West Virginia, May 2024 has officially been recognized as Older Americans Month, following a proclamation from Gov. Jim Justice.
The designation aims to recognize “the contributions of our older citizens” and promote “programs and activities that foster connection, inclusion and support for older adults,” Justice said in the proclamation.
The idea for the month came from Kanawha Valley Senior Services (KVSS), a nonprofit based in Charleston, according to a Monday press release.
KVSS offers a range of services including health resources like the Aged and Disabled Waiver program and an adult day center for individuals living with Alzheimer’s.
Justice wrote in the proclamation that it was important to recognize the contributions of older adults to American society, and to spread awareness about aging resources in West Virginia.
“Older Americans improve our communities through intergenerational relationships, community service, civic engagement and many other activities,” he wrote. “Through their wealth of life experience and wisdom, older adults guide our younger generations and carry forward abundant cultural and historical knowledge.”
Each county in West Virginia has its own senior service program. Visit the West Virginia Bureau of Senior Services website to find your local office.
A study will measure the effectiveness of telehealth as a means for patients to remain at home while managing their care.
Researchers at West Virginia University (WVU) are enrolling participants in an extended telehealth pilot program.
The project is a collaboration of the WVU Health Affairs Institute and West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, Bureau for Medical Services.
The program is an expansion of previous telehealth pilot work and will provide telehealth care to beneficiaries of Home and Community-Based Services.
Participants will have the opportunity to receive six months of telehealth services in their homes for free.
“With our telehealth program, one component of it is remote patient monitoring, monitoring of vital signs,” Associate Professor in WVU’s School of Public Health, Steven Davis, said. “They’re transmitted remotely.”
Participants will also receive a call from a nurse a couple of times a month to discuss their well-being.
Davis said telehealth can be a positive addition to existing health care.
“We would rather coordinate with their primary care providers to catch things early on so that they’re going to a lower level of care versus more costly care,” he said.
People living in West Virginia often need to go back to the hospital or are not able to live at home due to a variety of physical and mental health issues, according to Davis.
Telehealth can assist in monitoring these conditions closely to prevent unnecessary hospital visits or delays needing 24-hour care outside of the home.
To be eligible to participate, individuals must be a Medicaid Aged and Disabled Waiver, Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities Waiver, or Traumatic Brain Injury Waiver member.
Individuals interested in participating in the Extended Telehealth Pilot should complete a short interest form available on the Health Affairs Institute website at healthaffairsinstitute.org.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.
The program looks for residents of long-term care facilities who wish to return to their own homes and apartments and provides them with the support and services they need to move home, and back into their communities.
The program looks for residents of long-term care facilities who wish to return to their own homes and apartments and provides them with the support and services they need to move home, and back into their communities.
The program is supported by West Virginia’s Money Follows the Person, or MFP grant, through the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
The funding was announced in a press release from Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s office.
“The Take Me Home transition program allows many West Virginians with long-term health care needs to decide for themselves where the best setting is to receive the services they need,” Capito said. “For many, that is their own homes and communities. This grant will give West Virginia the needed support and flexibility to help improve the quality of health care and help drive down costs for West Virginia’s residents currently living in long-term care. As the Ranking Member of the Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee, I will keep fighting for the resources that help deliver the best standard of care possible for West Virginians.”
A group at the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech is researching extended family members who become dementia caregivers throughout central Appalachia. They want to understand how these caregivers moved into that role.
Caregiving for family members with dementia can be difficult and stressful. For many of those caregivers, it progresses from helping out a little bit to sometimes becoming a full-time job.
Now, a group at the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech is researching extended family members who become dementia caregivers throughout central Appalachia. They want to understand how these caregivers moved into that role.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: You’re researching caregivers, family, familial caregivers for people with dementia?
McCann: That’s right. This study is focused specifically on extended family caregivers. I will just tell you quickly about how we came to be studying extended family. So the primary investigators for this study were doing a study based in Appalachian Virginia on service use and dementia caregiving. They noticed that about 10 to 15 percent of the sample was extended family caregivers. When we say that, we mean siblings who are helping out, grandchildren, nieces and nephews and just other extended family caregivers, because typically it’s an adult child or a spouse who is in that primary caregiving role.
Douglas: For what it’s worth, I’m in that role. My mother has middle stage dementia, and I’ve been dealing with that for the last several years. But you’re not talking about me caring for my mother, you’re talking about the rest of the family, the aunts and the siblings.
McCann: They’re often classified as “others” in research. How did these other family members get to be in this caregiving role? In that study, they were in a primary caregiving role as the first contact. So, now we’re doing this larger study. We started out in Virginia and now we’re interviewing people in North Carolina and Maryland, West Virginia, and the broader region, all the surrounding states of Virginia. We wanted to understand more about how these extended family caregivers came to be in that role, their family histories, what challenges they might face, in terms of service use, because we are very interested in understanding barriers to service use the families may face.
Douglas: What have you found so far?
McCann: We know there are larger demographic changes in the country and in the region. In family science, we used to talk about families as being shaped like a pyramid. There were maybe one or two older adults at the top, middle generation, a few more and then a lot of younger generation. You had this large circle of younger people to care for an older person. And now we see in family demography that there are fewer of those younger generations to care for an older adult. And so they talk about moving from a pyramid structure to a beanpole structure. There might be one niece, for example, who’s caring for not only her mother, but her aunts as well. We also see divorce and re-partnering across the lifespan, greater numbers of that. So maybe now stepchildren can be involved in the care of a person who’s having memory loss or dementia.
Douglas: I wonder too, if the kids have moved away, and now the kids are four states away, so it falls to somebody else to take care of grandma?
McCann: Absolutely, absolutely. And we see that maybe there’s a sibling who’s doing the day to day checking in, that kind of thing, and making sure that the person can still stay in their home. And maybe the adult child is the power of attorney, but they’re out of state and they’re maybe making some decisions, but they’re sharing the work of caregiving, so to speak.
Douglas: What’s the scale of this? Are we talking 30 percent of seniors in this category, 50 percent? Do you have any grasp?
McCann: That’s one of the things that we’re finding, even measuring the numbers of those extended family caregivers who are involved can be tricky, because it depends on how you define caregiving. Some people, it’s very clear, there’s one person involved; that’s typically an adult child or spouse, and they’re doing 90 percent of the stuff. But in other situations, you might have a whole family involved, it might be several adult children, maybe a spouse, grandchildren, especially I think of in rural areas, or an Appalachian region, where you may have family land, and where there are multiple families living on the same property. There’s all kinds of people helping this person stay in their home, maintain their lifestyle, as they had it before they started having cognitive decline. In that situation, there may be multiple people who are doing caregiving in that family so it gets a little bit harder to measure.
Douglas: I hadn’t thought about that kind of rural community where everybody lives up the same holler, so they check on mom.
McCann: That’s one of the challenges that we’re finding in terms of finding participants is that sometimes the grandchildren, for example, don’t think of themselves as caregivers. They might be going to Granny’s house every day. As a researcher, we would consider care work, going over there and helping her read the recipes to do family dinners, and maintaining those kind of family traditions. And that person can be going over there every day, doing all this really important work, but they don’t think of themselves as a caregiver. They’re just helping Granny.
Douglas: I wonder if those people think of caregiving as the more – nursing, physical, hands-on, feeding type behaviors versus just hanging out and being with them and making sure they take their meds and that kind of stuff.
McCann: That is such an important issue. I think people underestimate how important that is, and that’s why it can be hard when people do kind of reach a breaking point, and they realize they need help, it can be really hard to find somebody, because I think it’s hard to describe what exactly it is that they’re looking for.
We just published an article on caregiver vigilance, and when we asked caregivers how many hours a day do you feel like you need to be on duty for your relative who’s having memory problems? So often people say, 24/7, even if they’re only doing like three to four hours of actual stuff, that feeling of being constantly vigilant, providing that high quality level of care and attention to someone who’s experiencing cognitive decline is very, very important. That’s kind of the crux of the issue in terms of finding appropriate services and that kind of thing.
Douglas: Tell me about the research you’re doing. What do you need from somebody to participate?
McCann: We’re asking that people be an extended family caregiver. So that would, again, be siblings, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or any step and that they see the person three times a week and are involved in their care. So after they meet the inclusion criteria, then we do one longer interview that usually takes about an hour and a half on the telephone.
In that interview, we would ask them a little bit about their family history, we have some open-ended questions. And then we just kind of ask some standard caregiver questions about how stressed they feel, that kind of thing. And then we do eight daily diaries after that. So for eight evenings in a row, we call in, and those take about 10 to 15 minutes, and we just asked about the help they provided that day. It’s nine days total. We do compensate people for their time. So if they do all nine days, we send a $110 gift card to them, and also resources for whatever state.
In West Virginia, there’s the FAIR program that provides respite services for family caregivers of people with dementia. If somebody has a particular issue with getting their relative in the shower, which is a common thing, we might send tip sheets from the Alzheimer’s Association about that particular issue.
Douglas: What’s your end goal for this research?
McCann: The goal is twofold. First of all, it is to understand how these demographic changes that I mentioned earlier, such as divorce and re-partnering, families becoming smaller in the younger generations and movement, even in the Appalachian region, people may still move just within the region, but they’re still farther away. So we want to understand how these larger demographic changes are impacting families in caregiving situations.
The second one is focused on this service use. How we can help families overcome barriers to service use. Is it financial? Is it the person who has dementia doesn’t want services? That’s very tricky to handle. Just helping understand what barriers these families might be experiencing so we can provide better support to families. Because we know that families need more support.
To participate in this study at Virginia Tech, call 540-231-9250, send an email to carex@vt.edu, or visit their website and fill out the online form.
Researchers at Marshall University are seeking participants 55 and older to examine the effect of visual art activities on the well-being of aging adults.
Researchers at Marshall University are seeking participants 55 and older to examine the effect of visual art activities on the well-being of aging adults.
There are reports of the health benefits that come from participating in art activities and this study aims to examine that.
Sandra Reed, a professor of art at Marshall University, will oversee Marshall art alumni as they teach the art workshops.
“We hope we will gather hard data that demonstrates what so many individuals state. That they feel energized by having something creative in their hands that they’re focusing on, and not thinking about everything else in their life that they might, you know, frequently worry about,” Reed said.
The team will host two informational sessions for interested individuals to learn more about this health study. The first will be held at 9:30 a.m. on June 14 at the Barboursville Senior Center and the second at 10 a.m. on June 15 at the Ceredo Senior Wellness Center.
The first art workshop series will begin in July with two additional series to follow.
In addition to Reed, physician faculty from the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine Cynthia Pinson, M.D., Martha Sommers, M.D., Masa Toyama, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Marshall University and principal investigator on the study and Asma Nayyar, M.D., are collaborating on this study.
For more information about these schedules, visit the project’s website. To participate, e-mail ArtAndAging@marshall.edu or call Toyama (Principal Investigator) at 304-696-2777 or Reed (Professor of Art) at 304-696-5671.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.
Family recipes are a way to connect generations, but what happens when you’ve got grandma’s recipe, and it doesn’t have exact measurements? We also talk with Ohio poet laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour about Appalachia, poems — and getting published. And we revisit a story about an attraction at the confluence of the New and Gauley rivers — and the man who put it there.
Family recipes are a way to connect generations, but what happens when you’ve got grandma’s recipe, and it doesn’t have exact measurements?
We also talk with Ohio poet laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour about Appalachia, poems — and getting published.
And we revisit a story about an attraction at the confluence of the New and Gauley rivers — and the man who put it there.
You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.
A West Virginia Woman Reverse-Engineers Grandma’s Potato Candy
Old family recipes are shared and passed down through Appalachia. Sometimes, they come on fingerprint smudged, handwritten note cards stuffed in wooden boxes. Others show up in loose-leaf cookbooks. These family heirlooms can be a way to connect with the past. But not all of those hand-me-down recipes use exact measurements. So how do you know you’re getting it right?
For Brenda Sandoval in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, it involved some trial and error — and an assist from a cousin. Folkways Reporter Capri Cafaro has the story.
Brenda Sandoval rolling potato candy. Credit: Capri Cafaro/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Ohio’s Poet Laureate Celebrates Appalachia
Kari Gunter-Seymour is Ohio’s third poet laureate since the state created the position in 2016.
She’s an earnest cheerleader for Appalachian Ohio, which, as she points out, represents about a third of the state.
Gunter-Seymour is the author of several poetry collections. She’s the editor of “I Thought I heard a Cardinal Sing,” which showcases Appalachian writers in Ohio, as well as eight volumes of “Women Speak,” an anthology series featuring the work of women writers and artists from across Appalachia.
Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Gunter-Seymour about poetry, getting published, and the Appalachian part of Ohio.
When To Consider Assisted Living For Your Parents
One of the hardest parts of caring for aging parents is deciding when they need professional care. Whether that’s in-home services, assisted living, or something else. Families have to consider what’s best for their loved ones – and how to pay for it.
WVPB’s Eric Douglas spoke with Chris Braley, the owner of an assisted living and memory care facility in West Virginia.
There’s A Bus On A Rock In A River
Anna Sale. Credit: WNYC
If you listen to the popular podcast Death, Sex & Money, you know Anna Sale. Back in 2005, Anna was a reporter for West Virginia Public Broadcasting. She got curious about an old bus that sits on a rock at the confluence of the New and Gauley rivers, just past the town of Gauley Bridge. It’s not far from one of West Virginia’s best known roadside attractions, The Mystery Hole.
In 2005, Anna traveled by boat with former WVPB Video Producer Russ Barbour to meet the man behind the mystery. With warm weather and summer travel not that far away, we brought this story back.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by…Kaia Kater, Jeff Ellis, Erik Vincent, Eck Robertson, Chris Knight and Tyler Childers.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Zander Aloi also helped produce this episode.
You can send us an email at InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
