This history of benefiting the community is fundamental to the Jewish Home’s initiatives and philosophy, and informs its membership in “Building a Healthier San Francisco” –a collaboration of San Francisco hospitals, Department of Public Health, United Way, human services’ providers, philanthropic foundations, and numerous community-based organizations.
The following gives an overview of these community services from July 2010 to June 2011. For a complete account, download our comprehensive Community Benefit Report that covers this time period.
The Jewish Home is committed to the coordination of the scarce resources available to the expanding under-serviced and elderly community throughout the Bay Area. These efforts are ongoing, as they have been for almost a century and a half.
In general, the Jewish Home serves the most medically/cognitively frail, as well as financially indigent elders (85 percent of Jewish Home residents are indigent and/or Medi-Cal recipients who do not pay the full cost of care), with an average age of 86.
Through its coordinated care effort, the Home is integral in supporting seniors’ ability to live longer within the general community. The Home provides medical direction externally, and is an intrinsic part of a continuum of care throughout the Bay Area –from participation in the influenza prevention and Tdap vaccination program, to the Home’s medical director serving as a consultant to staff of an assisted living community in Danville, Calif., and nurse practitioners and physician’s assistant coordinating care for residents of a subsidized housing community in San Francisco and training their staff in assessment.
An increasing number of beds at the Jewish Home are dedicated to residents suffering from this disease. Innovations on the Jewish Home’s Alzheimer’s Garden Unit include an enclosed garden accessible only to this living environment and the creation of a more homelike setting in order to better serve these individuals. In addition, the careful, selective use of the WanderGuard (a signaling device that alerts when a person wearing one is about to exit the facility) enables the Home to care for many more residents with Alzheimer’s, as they may then safely reside on other living environments located on the campus. This also affords these individuals greater freedom to enjoy a variety of secure areas and outdoor spaces.
STARS, the Jewish Home’s short-term and rehabilitation services program, is designed for those age 65 or older who require temporary skilled oversight –including medical rehabilitation and management by on-site physicians, nursing care, and physical, occupational and speech therapies –usually following discharge from an acute hospital or an acute illness, with the goal of returning to the community. In response to the greater need for short-term and rehabilitation services, the Home has significantly expanded the number of beds initially allotted to this type of care.
When the Jewish Home’s remodeled acute geriatric psychiatry hospital opened in April 2010, it became the only psychiatric unit in the city dedicated to serving not only a senior but a geriatric population. Under licensing by the Department of Public Health, the Home is able to admit both voluntary and involuntary patients for acute, short-stay needs, thus filling a huge gap in medical care for elders.
The Jewish Home aims to promote and protect the community’s health by advancing and sharing knowledge and understanding of the factors that affect health. The following are some of the numerous endeavors undertaken during fiscal year ending June 30, 2011.
The Jewish Home’s president & CEO and the Home’s chief advancement officer were in attendance at the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging’s annual conference in Los Angeles, Calif., in November 2010. AAHSA members (the Jewish Home is included in this body) are committed to providing a full continuum of housing, care, and services for older adults. The future of aging services means providing services people need, when they need them, in the place they call home.
The president & CEO of the Jewish Home was invited to speak at the American Society on Aging 2011 Conference, Aging in America, which took place in April 2011 in San Francisco. He joined a panel of presenters as they discussed long-term care policy, which included how Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program, the new Medicaid provisions, transition benefits, and several demonstration projects will improve, change, and/or create opportunities for aging services’ providers. This week-long conference is the largest gathering of a diverse, multidisciplinary community of professionals from the fields of aging, health care and education.
The Jewish Home’s chief administrative officer attended Aging Services of California’s public policy conference in Sacramento, Calif., in March 2011. She joined other members of the more than 400 nonprofit providers of aging services represented by this public-interest association to, amongst other issues, lobby against the proposed cuts in Medi-Cal reimbursement.
The Jewish Home had a significant presence at the annual meeting of the American Medical Directors Association in Tampa, Fla., in March 2011. The Home’s medical director coordinated and taught a day-long intensive course entitled Mental Health in the Nursing Home. In addition, a team from the Jewish Home unveiled their poster detailing the Home’s new edema clinic. This well-defined, effective, economically sound solution to managing edema, a common and chronic problem in geriatric patients, is being enthusiastically utilized.
The Home’s chief nursing officer holds a series of lectures at the Home and at various similar facilities that focus on nursing retention in nursing homes. This involves studying values, organizational resources and recognition, and the effect these factors have on nursing homes’ success in retaining nurses, as well as satisfaction among nurses employed by these facilities.
In attendance at the April 2011 gathering in Philadelphia of the American Occupational Therapy Association was one of the Jewish Home’s occupational therapists, who also holds the position of assistant director of rehabilitation. On display was her poster presentation of the innovative flow arts program she instituted at the Home in 2010. Flow arts blends meditation, dance, exercise, and play into a fun and healthful activity that improves self-image, dexterity, focus, coordination, body awareness, self-confidence and spatial skills, and promotes brain plasticity. Some of the Jewish Home residents and short-stay patients who are engaged in studying this dance-art form had the added benefit of showcasing their talents at an exposition in San Francisco’s city center in April 2011.
A six-part educational series, entitled Fusion of the Maturing Mind, co-sponsored by the Jewish Home and AgeSong Institute, a program of Pacific Institute, was enhanced through presentations by three Jewish Home staff and a Jewish Home lay leader/volunteer. In February 2011, the director of the Home’s Center for Research on Aging discussed HIV and Aging. A co-presentation in April 2011 included the Home’s director of Integrative Medicine, while Medical Factors that Contribute to Making the Difficult Client Difficult was the topic covered by the Home’s medical director in May 2011.
The Jewish Home recognizes that providing and collaborating in educational opportunities for adults foster personal and professional development, enhance a sense of community, and promote cross-cultural understanding, cooperation, and support. Below are a few examples of the learning programs and information-sharing made available over the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011.
Over the past 38 years, the Jewish Home has partnered with San Francisco City College in offering several adult education classes to the general community. Approximately 20 to 25 students enroll each semester in the Creative Arts class, a weekly all-day endeavor of nine months’ duration. As this class includes resident artists, a spirit of collaboration and participation between the Home and the community is fostered and strengthened. Tai-chi Chia® Mind/Body/Spirit/Health is another course provided through City College that meets weekly at the Home each semester. It is also open to the general community and has an enrollment of 15 to 20 students.
The Jewish Home’s rabbi regularly teaches in the Jewish community and participates in both educational and leadership development programs with other agencies, such as Jewish Family and Children’s Services, Union for Reform Judaism, Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, and Bay Area congregations. He is often invited to make presentations to chaplains, Jewish professionals, and lay people on the use of poetry and sacred texts in pastoral care, and on spiritual issues related to aging, illness, and death.
The rabbi’s community teachings, his studies, and his work at the Jewish Home enhance and complement one another. His articles entitled God Is in the Text: Using Sacred Text and Teaching in Jewish Pastoral Care and Psalms, Songs & Stories: Midrash and Music at the Jewish Home of San Francisco are now widely used in seminary classes on pastoral care and by students in the field of clinical pastoral education.
The Home’s senior development & gift planning officer is a member of the San Francisco Estate Planning Council, a by-invitation membership organization of estate planning professionals. The gift planning officer has shared current legal and administrative compliance information about elder abuse awareness with professionals attending the council meetings. He has also provided summary information to assist attorneys in recognizing and handling elder abuse issues as they arise.
The influx of elderly Russian émigrés to the Bay Area had a significant impact upon San Francisco’s Jewish community. The Jewish Home continues to address this population’s need for residential care, programs, and services. With the assistance of full-time Russian-speaking staff in a range of disciplines and departments, over 125 Russian-speaking residents benefit from the robust Russian services program offered by the Home.
The Jewish Home is one of the only kosher kitchens in the Bay Area capable of preparing meals for upwards of several hundred people in any given week. To that end, the Jewish Home has collaborated for more than nine years with the San Francisco Jewish Community Center (JCC) to provide hot, nutritious, kosher meals to community-dwelling seniors. For many of our elders, this community meal program represents the main meal of their day, and the only opportunity for them to spend time socializing with others.
The Home prepares approximately 15,000 meals per year (about 1,250 a month) for the JCC. Not only does the Home prepare hot meals, but this past year the JCC also requested that the Home prepare meals that are then frozen, so they may be delivered to seniors who are unable to go to the center due to illness or injury. The Jewish Home also ensures that our community seniors are not forgotten or alone during special times, which entails preparing tasty, traditional meals for 11 important holidays throughout the year.
The Jewish Home’s director of Social Services and Admissions held a place on a panel at Congregation Emanu-El in June 2011 to discuss Parenting Your Parents, part 2. Moderated by the temple’s senior rabbi, the forum covered the red flags to watch for relating to the aging process; the emotional impact on the caregiver and recipient; having “the conversation” regarding driving and mobility; managing finances; resources for palliative care; strategies and resources for managing issues when family members live far away; and available local and national resources.
The Home’s community liaison director attends San Francisco Senior Roundtable meetings, informing agencies serving San Francisco’s aging adult population of the programs and services provided by the Home. Additionally, he enjoys a symbiotic relationship with a number of senior-focused agencies. One such is Legacy, run in collaboration with the American Society on Aging. This forum is dedicated to raising awareness about the needs of the aging community, the importance of networking with peers, and the enabling of professional development through educational presentations and community service.
Encouraging social responsibility, providing access to information and ideas that help build and sustain an enlightened and involved community, and utilizing highly qualified staff, the community service learning opportunities offered by the Jewish Home continue to earn the respect, cooperation, and support of Bay Area organizations and institutions.
The Jewish Home partners with local high schools that aim to involve youth in their community by encouraging them to fulfill needs in their respective milieus. Mutual goals include the promotion of civic responsibility and the development of leadership skills. By volunteering at the Home, students gain valuable life experiences and acquire volunteer time required for college admissions. During this past fiscal year, students from Archbishop Riordan High School, Leadership High School, and Saint Ignatius completed their community service requirements at the Home.
The Home also partners with local colleges to host service-learning programs, which combine experiential learning with community service. The purpose of service-learning is to enhance classroom instruction by providing students with practical field experience while, at the same time, meeting the needs of the community partner. This past year, students from City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University were placed at the Home.
Regarded as one of the premier training sites for rabbinic interns specializing in geriatric work, the Home continues to provide training and supervision to rabbinic students from Hebrew Union College –Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, Calif., and Hebrew Union College –Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. The students gain knowledge about aging and the illnesses associated with old age from residents, staff members across all departments, volunteers, and family members. Through this essential on-the-job training, the students learn about collaboration, discover how a large institution works, and how a rabbi functions within this kind of setting. These internship opportunities also enable Jewish Home residents to experience the gratification of being mentors to young rabbinic students.
Second-year medical students from University of California, San Francisco are hosted by the Jewish Home’s rabbi every January as part of the students’ essential core curriculum. In fiscal year 2011, eight medical students chose to attend this particular session at the Jewish Home. The program helps the medical students appreciate the challenges and rewards of working with patients and families during serious and terminal illness. The students observe the rabbi’s style of visitation with Jewish Home residents, study texts and poems with him, and reflect on ways in which pastoral care may be integrated into a physician’s practice.
A year-round, four-year high school scholarship and enrichment program for underserved, low-income minority students, Project ACHIEVE opens a world of possibilities by providing students with access to quality education –including cultural, career, and community service experiences. A total of 32 ACHIEVE students from Archbishop Riordan High School and Mercy High School participated in an academic-year program at the Jewish Home, where they assisted residents of the Home with a variety of activities, ranging from Oneg Shabbat (post-Sabbath) services to acting as companions. Partnerships and interactions such as these result in a deeper understanding and appreciation of both generations’ perspectives, life experiences, and challenges.
Throughout the academic year, the Jewish Home offers internship opportunities for recreation therapy students to gain clinical experience. The intern is also required to complete a special project that will encourage their continued learning, as well as positively impact the Jewish Home, specifically in the area of recreation and leisure.
The Home frequently participates in joint educational programs with religious and non-religious youth groups. Teachers from synagogues often request visits to the Home when they wish to introduce their students to the wider Jewish community, educate them about the cycle of life and respect for elders, and promote the concept of community service. The Home collaborates with, among others, Bay Area Mitzvah Corps, Brandeis Hillel Day School, Congregation Beth Am, Congregation Beth El, Congregation Beth Sholom, Congregation Emanu-El, Congregation Kol Shofar, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav Congregation Sherith Israel, Mercy High School, Peninsula Beth El, Peninsula Jewish Community Center, and Peninsula Temple Sholom.
The Young Adults Division (YAD) of the Jewish Community Federation provided community service at the Jewish Home by celebrating the Jewish holidays with the Home’s residents and patients. These kinds of projects make for rewarding and enjoyable interactions across generations.
Employment Plus, a nonprofit agency, seeks both paid and voluntary employment for adults with developmental disabilities and provides on-the-job support through job coaching. The long-term goal of the program is to have individuals become fully integrated, participatory, and contributing members of the community in which they work and live. The short-term goal is to maximize each individual’s self-reliance, independence, and productivity. The Home serves as a work site for four adult participants in this program who perform duties in the Home’s Environmental Services department one and a half hours per day, four days a week, accompanied by a job coach.
The Jewish Home’s community liaison director successfully lobbied for the Home to host the January –June 2011 San Francisco Senior Roundtable meetings. In addition to strengthening community partnerships and promoting awareness of the Home’s short-stay programs as valuable resources to the community, these gatherings provide networking opportunities and deliver an educational component in the form of a guest speaker.
Medical social workers, hospital discharge planners, and other geriatric specialists gathered at the Jewish Home in October 2010 for the Home’s 10th annual hosting of the Bay Area Social Workers In Health Care event. This much-anticipated occasion once again featured a reception, a dinner, and an enlightening hour of continuing education. How to explore the meaning behind our symptoms: An introduction to a very different understanding of human pathology was the title of the evening’s address, presented by the president and CEO of an assisted living care organization and founder of a nonprofit educational organization.
The Jewish Home is a mid-size employer in the city of San Francisco and provides employment to more than 700 employees each year, ranging from skilled labor to executive-level positions.
Staff of the Jewish Home supported the efforts of the San Francisco Food Bank by hosting and participating in a food drive at the end of 2010. The Home’s efforts helped the Food Bank provide supplies to over 400 food programs operated by partnering community service agencies and food pantries throughout the city that serve low-income families, senior citizens, and other individuals in need.
The Jewish Home successfully partners with local organizations, fostering dialogue, collaborations, and ongoing communications with its neighbors.
As an exponent of celebrating aging as a positive experience, the Jewish Home was pleased to be a supporter of Age March. In August 2010, people of all ages, races, genders, sexualities, and economic walks of life gathered for this one-mile march, with the aim of raising age awareness and a breaking down of the myths, stereotypes, and social pressures causing age discrimination, shame and negative attitudes toward aging in our culture.
The Jewish Home was a sponsoring participant in a resource faire put on by the San Francisco LGBT Community Partnership in December 2010. The LGBT Community Partnership is part of a larger San Francisco effort dedicated to improving access to quality services for older adults and adults with disabilities, and addressing issues of aging, disability, HIV, service quality, advocacy, networking and collaboration.
“Team Jewish Home” gathered in September 2010 at San Francisco’s Mission Creek Park for the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2010 Memory Walk. Some members of the Home’s team walked for a dear Jewish Home resident who has Alzheimer’s. Some walked for a loved one they had lost to Alzheimer’s. Everyone walked in this nationwide movement to stop this devastating disease.
The overall goal of research undertaken at the Jewish Home of San Francisco Center for Research on Aging is to improve the care and quality of life of older people, especially the frail elderly. Opportunities are provided for intellectual scholarship, clinically based research, and basic research into the mechanism of age-related processes, disability, and disease –making this cooperation of investigators, staff, study volunteers, and their families an investment in the future welfare of the community.
In 2008, the Jewish Home entered into an affiliation agreement with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Clinical Translational Research Institute as a community partner, to promote efforts to translate research findings into clinical therapies and disseminate them throughout the community. The UCSF Harris M. Fishbon Distinguished Professorship for Clinical Translational Research will be based at the Jewish Home.
The director of the Jewish Home’s Center for Research on Aging and her co-investigator from UCSF’s Division of Geriatrics continue to study how multiple medications affect elderly Americans who suffer from multiple diseases, and how to improve their treatments. This ongoing study is made possible through funding by a National Institutes of Health challenge grant, an award garnered by the Jewish Home’s research director through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
In order to identify areas for future research, the director of the Home’s Center for Research on Aging attended and was a plenary speaker at the 1st International Workshop on HIV & Aging in Baltimore, Md., in October 2010. With an aging HIV-infected population –and suggestions that HIV itself may cause conditions normally associated with aging –the workshop presented a unique and much-needed platform for international scientific exchange on the increasingly recognized problems of HIV and aging. Gathering a cross-disciplinary team of experts and trainees in an interactive and science-focused setting, the latest developments were reviewed and evaluated in order to identify important topics for future research, develop better approaches to treatment, and create a strategic agenda for future management problems associated with HIV and aging.
Findings of a research paper –the culmination of years of research by University of California, San Francisco Allergy and Immunology Research director, and which lists the Jewish Home’s research director as one of the co-authors –received extensive coverage, ranging from University of California, San Francisco’s print and online sources, to Science Blog and newspapers in Canada and the United Kingdom. The research team’s findings –that extremely low doses of the drug lenalidomide can stimulate the body’s immune-cell protein factories (which decrease production during aging) –could lead to a daily pill to boost immunity in the elderly.
In collaboration with the San Francisco-based American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Home serves as a weekly on-site acupuncture clinic, helping acupuncture students gain experience in treating elders and providing residents who choose to manage their treatment through this modality with the opportunity to do so in a convenient setting and manner.
Geriatric fellows from the University of California, San Francisco receive training at the Home one to two days per week for five months each year. As part of their ICD 131 Foundations of Patient Care class, first- and second-year medical students from UCSF are in attendance at the Home approximately twice a month. Family Practice residents from San Francisco General Hospital’s program attend four days a month, while Internal Medicine residents from UCSF attend weekly. Internal Medicine residents from California Pacific Medical Center are in attendance approximately twice a month. Additionally, students from the University of California, Berkeley, Samuel Merritt College, and the University of California, Davis, had rotations at the Home, introducing them to aspects of geriatrics.
As a complement to traditional medical care, Healing Touch –a therapeutic approach that uses gentle, non-invasive hands-on touch and energy techniques –has proven to be a particularly good tool for decreasing agitation in residents with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. This award-winning program has been enthusiastically embraced by the Home’s culture, by the medical community, and beyond.
At the initiative of the Jewish Home’s rabbi and director of Jewish Life, the Home implemented Kol Haneshama: Jewish End-of-Life/Hospice Volunteer Program – a program of volunteer and staff training that the Jewish Home co-sponsors with the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center. The Home and the Healing Center have worked in close partnership with the Zen Hospice Project, an innovator in the training of volunteers for end-of-life care. In addition to the interagency cooperation resulting from this program, numerous families have benefited from knowing their loved one formed a close relationship as they approached the end of their life.
The needs that this award-winning, nationally recognized program addresses is enhanced by the work of the Home’s Palliative Care Committee, an interdisciplinary group that looks beyond symptom management to the psychosocial and spiritual aspects of the end-of-life and dying residents and their families.
Continuing and expanding upon its 140-year history of service is fundamental to the Jewish Home’s organizational philosophy and strategic planning initiatives. Objectives to achieve this include the role the Home played in the development of the Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life in Palo Alto, Calif., providing independent and assisted living services to the South Peninsula.
Furthermore, the Home will continue to explore collaborations with organizations that have similar missions, with the intent of extending the breadth of care, programs, and services so as to better serve constituent members, while increased fundraising initiatives will ensure continued ability to serve the frail and indigent elderly in the future.
The Jewish Home’s site master plan aims to bring it into alignment with the prospect of health care reform and the way in which care will be delivered in the future. To accommodate seniors’ diverse and changing wishes, needs and interests, the Home anticipates serving a greater number of older adults across a broader cross section of the caring continuum –such as independent living, assisted living, memory support units, and community-based health care services –even as it continues to provide the best care and services possible to its key population of frail elders.
Along with Jewish Home & Senior Living Foundation, Jewish Senior Living Group has been established to develop a broad and integrated network of senior living communities and services in the Bay Area.
The Jewish Home’s board of trustees is committed to its long tradition of service to the entire community and, in particular, the underserved. It will continue to identify and plan for needs and wants as the ages and demographics of members of the community and the Home’s residents undergo change.
Through on-site visits and programs, youth groups from schools and synagogues learn about the wider Jewish community, the cycle of life, and respect for elders.
