Posts Tagged ‘Seniors’ Housing Menus’

Food and grab bars

Friday, April 8th, 2011

I realize that I have posted about these two issues on numerous occasions but they are both something of bêtes noires for me.

I have been travelling a lot and have eaten at several seniors’ projects. In one of them (which will remain nameless) the food was execrable. It isn’t often you get to use “execrable” in a sentence and I would have been glad of the opportunity if it weren’t for the fact that because I couldn’t eat the food I was extremely hungry.

I mentioned this to my good friend and colleague Rita Thibault at Westbridge Group Valuation Partner and she said: “Aren’t people trained to cook decent food for large numbers of people?” Good question. One of the residents at a sister project of the aforementioned community, where the food was much better but apparently still not up to snuff, commented that if the chef really were trained at some school the school ought to be shut down.

It consistently amazes and astonishes me that operators serve such lousy food. Even in projects that are fully funded and also full of people who can’t afford to move anywhere else, you would think simple human decency would lead these operators to serve decent food.

Then yesterday I ate a community that prides itself on its food and rightly so. My lunch was delicious. Food costs here are $7.50 per person per day, which is on the high side, but not only are the residents happy, the community generates a lot of revenue by catering outside events.

Enough said about food, at least for today, and on to grab bars. I have been in two seniors communities recently that have no grab bars in the bathroom because these communities are intended for “independent seniors”. That’s just dumb. Even hotels are better than that, or at least some hotels. I am currently staying in a brand new mid-range hotel and there is not a grab bar in site although the bathtub is very high. How many people do you think actually have baths in hotels? Very few I imagine. Why don’t they install showers instead? Even if there is some logic to the bathtubs, why no grab bars? Grab bars make tubs safer for everybody, to say nothing of the one in four British Columbians who are going to be over 65 in no time flat.

So there you have it – my rants for today.

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An Asian Retirement Community

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Readers of this blog are by now familiar with one of my many obsessions, that being the impact of multi-generational cultures on the demand for supportive seniors housing. The hypothesis is that in cultures where families look after their elders at home until they are so frail they need residential care, the intermediate step of supportive housing (IL, congregate care, service-enriched) is skipped. Here in very multi-cultural British Columbia, there is lots of evidence indicating that this hypothesis is a sound one. For example, in spite of a very large Chinese population (which typically cares for elders at home) there is only one small private pay supportive housing project targeted at the Chinese community.

But a recent issue of the Journal of Active Aging focuses on a retirement community targeted directly at the Asian community in Fremont, California that has been around for a decade. Fremont is a community of just over 200,000 people that is part of the much larger San Francisco Bay area (over 7 million people). The 64 unit project is owned and operated by Aegis Living and is called Aegis Gardens. The article is very positive, highlighting the linguistic skills of the staff (all, at a minimum, speak Cantonese or Mandarin or both), the design of the project (incorporating feng shui principles), and the activities (tai chi, mah-jong, origami). Food is not addressed in the article.

Outcomes have been extremely successful—80% of residents participate in physical activity programs, falls are a fraction of what they are at most communities, average age is older than at most other communities, staff turnover is extremely low.

The president of Aegis is quoted in the article as saying the company needed to negotiate a very steep learning curve on the way to success.

Part of that learning curve is described in an article in the San Jose Mercury News in 2004. That is a very long time ago but it is interesting to note that way back then, residents were upset. Here are some excerpts from the article:

But in the last few months, residents say, beloved Chinese staff members have resigned or been released, and replaced by employees who speak only English. The new staff members have implemented several culturally puzzling changes: buying wine for “happy hour,” moving a pingpong table into the tai chi space, and banning residents from cooking zong zi, a special rice dumpling prepared for the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival.

Residents have also complained that the center only spent $5.25 per resident a day on food. Though management has since raised the food budget to $5.75 a day, the food budget remains an issue. [note: $5.00 per day on food is quite common in 2011]

The Aegis Gardens situation is a “typical business problem” among companies trying to serve ethnic communities, said Felipe Korzenny, Florida State University professor of marketing communities and a local marketing consultant. The Aegis company has no Asian-American managers or corporate executives outside of its Chinese-oriented facility, Lucas said.

Note that was way back in 2004 and clearly, Aegis has addressed those issues. But the fact remains that in a metropolitan area of over 7 million people, where 20% are Asian, there is only one very small retirement community for those 1.5 million people.

Perhaps there are others and if any blog readers know of them please let me know.

Note: in US demographics “Asian-American” typically includes people of East, South East and South Asian descent.

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Another Bad Rap for Seniors

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

It’s taken me a while to catch up on my newspapers after spending a wonderful week in New York recently. I was taken aback by a Facts & Argument piece in the September 1st issue of the Globe and Mail. Facts & Argument is written by Globe readers, in this case a woman living in Toronto whose mother moved into and out of a “swanky” retirement residence in April. Its location is not specified in the article but it might be BC. I suggest that for two reasons—one is that the mum lived in a condo by the sea before moving into the retirement residence (actually the tense should be present not past because she moved right back into it before the condo could be sold), and the other is that the family grew up in Winnipeg.  I don’t know the actual numbers but I am sure ex-Winnipeggers living in BC outnumber ex-Winnipeggers living on the east coast by several orders of magnitude.

The article focused on the truly horrible food the family ate while growing up—it was appalling, heavy on the TV dinners, KFC, spam spam and more spam, and the delicacy known as “tuna goo”—canned tuna, frozen peas, and cream of mushroom soup.

And yet in spite of a gastronomic history like this, the mother moved out of her swanky residence after three weeks because the food was “inedible–cold and tasteless”.

There are three main messages to take from this article. One is that it is truly unfortunate for the industry when stories like this appear—they reinforce everyone’ s suspicions about retirement homes, suspicions that are usually baseless. The second is that the food in this case may have been a red herring, to keep the food theme going. Maybe the mum was simply not prepared to move. And the third message is that if the food really WAS inedible, that suggests operational stupidity of the very highest order.

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Americans Moving to Canada in Search of More Affordable Seniors’ Housing and Health Care?

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

I read a comment about this recently. The writer was hypothesizing that as costs for seniors’ housing and health care rise in the US, Americans might move to Canada or Mexico in search of more affordable alternatives.

In both cases (i.e. Canada and Mexico) the fly in the ointment for Americans actually contemplating such a move would be health care and immigration policies, but aside from that, are costs really cheaper in Canada? My first reaction was scepticism but upon re-reading a few brochures I picked up at the recent ALFA conference in Phoenix, I thought: “well, maybe it IS cheaper in Canada, at least for some types of housing and health care”.

For example, at the Forum at Desert Harbor, the daily rate for a private room in the long term care component of the campus is $280, which is to say just over $100,000 per year. There aren’t many private pay long term care facilities in Canada that are charging $280 per day.

But at the same time, the rate at the Forum for a two bedroom 922 square foot independent living apartment is only $2,868 per month (the meal package includes breakfast and one other meal). The Forum is an upscale project with lots of amenities including a lakefront location, a pool, and a grapefruit tree, to say nothing of that desert climate.

Americans would have a tough time finding a similar value in Canada. The trick at the Forum is obviously to stay out of long term care!

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What you could do if you had 808 units

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

I toured Friendship Village in Tempe, AZ while attending the recent ALFA conference in Phoenix. It’s spread over 43 acres and has 575 independent living units (bungalows and apartments), 91 assisted living units, and 142 care beds. There’s a pool, a fully equipped fitness facility (very busy when we popped in at 10:30am), an auditorium, a library, woodworking shops, a billiards room, a 9,000 square foot recreation centre featuring rooms for dancing, weaving, ceramics, video editing, and stained glass, and three dining areas: a cafe that is open all day and looks exactly like a real cafe, a large buffet that’s likewise open all day, and a formal dining room that is open on a reservation basis at dinner time.

The first time I saw a buffet in operation at a new upscale project in Red Deer I was taken aback because of what I assumed would be the difficulty of dealing with a buffet if you had a walker or were just generally unsteady on your feet. But people at Friendship Village seemed to manage just fine – they put their food on the seat of the walker, or staff there was around to help. And it’s worth noting that at breakfast or lunch it’s the buffet or the café and that’s it – no table service is available, which is interesting in itself. Do people stay independent longer if you force them to retrieve their own breakfast and lunch from a buffet?

Aside from the array of amenities you can offer if you have 808 units, the other advantage is that there are people everywhere – in the cafe, in the buffet, in the pool, in the fitness centre. It’s lively! It’s hard to achieve the same ambience if you’ve only got 100 units or so and it’s impossible to offer the same array of amenities. But that doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to sepulchral silence and meals in the dining room at precisely 11:30 and 4:30. Au contraire – stay tuned for ideas.

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Fine Dining in Long Term Care: A Contradiction in Terms?

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Not in Phoenix! Or indeed all over the USA where fine dining in long term care is a definite trend. I toured a state-of-the-art not-for-profit skilled nursing facility in nearby Tempe AZ on Monday. I was profoundly impressed. The goal of the owner of the facility, Friendship Village, was to retain the ambience of a residential environment and avoid any feel of the institutional. Without question they achieved the goal. The hallways are gorgeous—no other word will do although it seems odd to describe a hallway as gorgeous. Unlike every other hallway I have seen in a care facility, they undulate. They are also carpeted, painted in beautiful colors, and highlighted with artwork and furniture at appropriate intervals.  Doorways are recessed. The contrast with many independent living communities I am familiar with could not be starker.

The dining rooms blew me away too— linen tablecloths and napkins! And menu choices! And open eating hours! I don’t like to overdo the exclamation marks but the facility was really unlike anything I have ever seen.

“Ah but what does all this cost?” you are no doubt thinking. Friendship Village is a life care community—residents buy in at the independent living stage and whatever care they need beyond that stage is provided at the same monthly cost. For example, a one bedroom unit may cost $160,000 (assuming no return of capital) plus monthly fees of $2,300 (meals, housekeeping, laundry etc). If someone buying in at this level were ever to require skilled nursing care, they would continue to pay the same monthly fee they paid in independent living (adjusted for inflationary increases).

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