Enhancing Aging Services
Faculty in the College of Social Work including Drs. Holly Dabelko-Schoeny, Shantha Balaswamy, Keith Anderson and Virginia Richardson pursue strategies aimed at improving long-term care services for elders and their caregivers. This includes efforts to better describe and evaluate the delivery of care to elders in Ohio and elsewhere, as well as efforts to introduce new approaches to care. Dr. Balaswamy conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Ohio Adult Protective Services focused on the examining the effectiveness of the service delivery system for older adults who are victims of mistreatment. The recommendations were utilized to change the service delivery system and to advocate for funding from state. This study has been a model for several other states in evaluating their program. Dr. Balaswamy continues to pursue efforts to safe guard older adults, working with the Ohio Coalition For Adult Protective Service to improve the infrastructure for receiving reports of elder mistreatment in Ohio’s 88 counties and working with the Center for Aging with Dignity, the University of Cincinnati, College of Nursing, to protect older adults from financial exploitation.
With Dr. Holly Dabelko-Schoeny, Dr. Balaswamy is involved in a study to assess whether service coordination, as an intervention method, helps increase access to health and social services for older residents in public housing, thereby improving their overall quality of life. It uses a multi-dimensional model to assess the direct and indirect effects of bio-psycho-social factors that influence service utilization and prevention of relocation from subsidized housing.
Drs. Keith Anderson and Holly Dabelko-Schoeny are working collaboratively with Heritage Day Health Centers, the largest provider of adult day services for older adults in the state of Ohio, to examine the impact of civic engagement on self-esteem, perceived usefulness, and overall well-being of individuals with cognitive and physical disabilities. This study is an extension of work Dr. Dabelko-Schoeny has conducted on the psycho-social benefits of adult day services on participants which was funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation. Drs. Anderson and Dabelko-Schoeny are further collaborating on a national study to examine the current state of the adult day services industry and evidence-based practices in adult day programs related to diabetes care, dementia care and caregiving.
Improving formal and informal caregiving to elders is a core component of services. For informal caregivers this means supporting their capacity to deal with the grief and loss associated with caring for a loved one. Dr. Richardson and Dr. Anderson are engaged using data from the Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) study, analyzing possible associations between caregiving pre-and post bereavement, and physiological immune system responses. Dr. Richardson is collaborating with an international group of researchers to evaluate the efficacy of a recently proposed model of grief counseling created by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut from the University of Utrecht. Results of their efforts will be presented in a special issue of Omega: Journal of Death and Dying that Dr. Richardson is editing for publication in 2010.
