Senior care bill passes but funding questions remain

Fully funded package would cost $4.7 million

By Adam Wilson | The Olympian • Published March 07, 2008

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Ten days have passed and a bandage still covers Gary Pomeroy's left elbow — evidence that the 86-year-old survived the kind of accident that hospitalizes more people in Washington than in any other state.

About House Bill 2668

Known as the "aging in place" bill, it would increase respite support for those who care for seniors, create a statewide fall-prevention program, establish a behavioral health intervention program to help caregivers of seniors who act out physically, fund a senior dental access program, and fund aging and disability resource centers.

Dangers of falling

For people 65 and older, falling is a deadly threat. According to the Department of Health:

• Falls sent 12,200 seniors to the hospital and killed 491 others in 2005. The same year, car crashes hospitalized 2,663 people of all ages and killed 500.

• One-quarter of seniors who fall are in a nursing home within a year.

• 20 percent of seniors who fracture a hip die within a year.

• Fall-related hospital stays cost an average of $17,000 and recovery care costs just as much or more.

Pomeroy said his walker became caught in a crack between the floor and an elevator. To combat Parkinson's disease and stay limber, he lifted weights and practiced his balance this week at Stumble Stoppers, a fall-prevention program at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia.

His brother fell at age 90, he said, and "he never did get quite back to normal."

Exercise programs can reduce falls by 41 percent, a state study says. The Legislature plans to expand the programs statewide, part of a package of services aimed at keeping members of the surging senior population in their own homes longer.

It would give people such as Dorothy "Dot" McLaughlin a break.

For five years, McLaughlin, 67, has been caring for her 88-year-old mother, Lucille, in her Olympia home.

"It was an agreement when my mom moved in with me, we would do everything we could to keep her home as long as we could. And when we learned she had Alzheimer's, we kept the agreement," McLaughlin said.

Lucille fell, hurt her knee and broke her hip last year. Now she's in a wheelchair. McLaughlin went to the Area Agency on Aging to sign up for respite care, in which the agency would send a caregiver to watch the mother while the daughter takes a break.

"I've got my name on the waiting list," McLaughlin said. "It's just there's a lot of us out there in need. The bottom line out there is all of us need time away."

Unanimous support

Exercise programs could receive as much as $1.5 million in added funding under Engrossed Second Substitute House Bill 2668, which was passed by the Senate on Friday.

"Knowing that every Wednesday, 4 to 8, someone will be here to take care of mom is huge. When people call about that, they aren't saying, 'I want to go to Hawaii.' They want to go to their own doctor's appointments," said June Moore, an assistance specialist at the Area Agency on Aging.

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