An Independant? Living Community: A Use Study

When you think of Senior Living, what comes to mind?? Memory Care, a nursing home, or maybe an assisted living community. However, there is one overlooked area of senior living: Independent living communities.

Ed Henpenney is a 68-year-old man looking for a new place to live. He finds his home is too big for only him after his children moved out.? He and his daughter are touring senior living apartments. They really like Pine Ridge Village, an independent living for those 55 years and older. They offer a cafe for inexpensive meals, a community room for parties and to spend time with friends and family, and a light social calendar which includes planned trips to the museum with a tour guide and a Friday afternoon happy hour in the cafe. ?

Ed’s daughter, Lisa, like many adult children, is concerned about her Dad.? Even though Ed has a clean bill of health, what would happen if there was an emergency? What if he needed help and he couldn’t reach his phone? Or worse, what if he couldn’t talk to the people who could help him? Lisa brought this up during a meeting with Pine Ridge Village’s manager.? Others had suggested that she get her Dad a Life Alert system, but Ed made it known how much he hated wearing something around his neck. Wasn’t there anything else?

Recently, Pine Ridge Village made an investment in Cornell’s IndePendant mobile nurse call system.? Pine Ridge Village’s manager took Lisa and Ed on a tour of what IndePendant in a community like Pine Ridge Village looks like.? The manager showed Ed and Lisa the pull cords next to the toilets in both the public and in the tenant’s bathroom. The cord would call an off-site monitoring center who would then call 911 to the location of the emergency.? The cords could also be installed in the bedrooms next to the bed, but only if the tenant wanted that extra security. Lisa let out a chuckle when the manager pointed out the pull cords not only glowed in the dark but are also anti-bacterial.

“They really thought of everything,” Lisa whispered.??

Tenants at Pine Ridge Village have the option to wear a pendant around their neck or on their wrist. Some of the tenants enjoyed walking on the paths around the apartment building and for their safety they chose to wear a pendant. Ed loves watching judge and detective shows in his apartment and currently only goes outside when his daughter visits. He will not wear a pendant, but there are also emergency buttons along the path that he can push if something were to occur that will still send help.

Lisa could feel her shoulders and face relax when the manager told her about this new call system.? Ed doesn’t mention to Lisa that he feels a little safer knowing he could pull a cord and help would come. He hates that he’s getting older, but living at Pine Ridge Village helps him stay as young as he feels.

?The manager loves that Cornell’s IndePendant system can be programmed to call an offsite central monitoring system in accordance with their community’s policy.? She doesn’t have to hire additional staff to monitor the system.

To learn more about inform go to www.cornell.com, call 414-351-4660, or email [email protected]

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