Utah's "Quality Aging.

Utah's "Quality Aging," Broad-Based Prevention of point in dispute Drinking

Learning to do discerning breathing in moments of stres finding gone out about the typical stages of grief, or attending a workshop that talks about ways to handle anger--these may present the appearance to be activities unrelated to abuse of alcohol by way of the elderly.

David gymnast director of the Quality Aging Program in Salt Lake City, Utah would not agree. "We're now seeing alcohol abuse through older people as a symptom of other deeper problems" said gymnast "Low self-esteem, losses of many kinds and societal ageism may all act as motivators for abuse of alcohol in ancient age.

"If we accept the notion that point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds with alcohol may be an attempt to self-medicate pain," continued gymnast "then improving coping skills, instituting life-style changes and seeking help with difficult transitions will make the risk of alcohol abuse."

gymnast said this back-door approach to alcohol abuse prevention is the extract of the Quality Aging Program which gives at least 12 different health promotion workshops clear of charge to any arrange of senior adults. Topics include Asserting Without Assaulting, suitable Grief, Nutrition, Physical Fitness, Sexuality and Aging, Stres Management, Upping Your self-complacency and Wise Use of Medications.

Depending onward the group's particular needs, a workshop can be designed for undivided session or offered weekly for a 4- to 6-week period. The workshops are held in place of educations libraries, churches, hospitals, senior center retirement complexe and on the same level private homes.

Quality Aging, which operates in a less degree than the sponsorship of Salt Lake shire Aging Services, is supported through a grant from the Utah State Division of Alcoholism and put drugs intos with additional funds coming from a Social Services mould Grant (Title XX). Since the audience is large (120000 residents of Salt Lake County) and the staff is small (David gymnast and Program Assistant Jean Weinberger), offers are essential. Pharmacists may give the workshop forward medications; doctors, nurses and attorneys contribute to the series in succession care-giving; and during this past year a retired social worker has moveed workshops that draw on her particular skills.

"One of the most numerous gratifying aspects of the program," make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed Turner, "is the growth of older individuals who started as participants and now lead assign places tos of their peers. Good workshop materials are the [i]clavis[/i] to success," he stressed, noting that the core curriculum came from pair sources--A Healthy Old Age: A Source-book for Health Promotion for Older Adults (Fallcreek and Mettler) and Prevention: A tonic to Healthy Aging (Fletcher, et al).

Since programs must change to stay healthy, gymnast and Ms. Weinberger have added curriculum materials in answer to requests for new topics. "To the basic classes, we added Memory Improvement and then fit Grief--a class focusing on the ne to grieve--on grief as a healthy reply to an emotional wound."

gymnast added: "AARP's health advocacy series sparked strange ideas and from there we discovered the National Council upon the Aging's "Self-Discovery Through the Humanities" series. Then the senior RX devise in San Francisco and the somewhat advanced in life Outreach Project of the St Francis Medical Center in Pittsburgh gave us the idea to attempt a reader's theatre. This is a kind of theatre in which there are no style of dresss or scenery, just stools, a music stand and a play to read. We have lay the foundation of people are more willing to portray a character with question s than to admit to being the same Reader's theatre also gives audiences rich rations for thought and discussion."

gymnast advises other professionals to find without about good health promotion materials that are already perform the operations indicated ined (see his list below). "It is distressing to diocese that some new health promotion series which must have taken month to prepare is basically a rehash of what is already without there," Turner commented. He emphasized that "a program that has as its mission the delivery of prevention services has precious little time to create materials."

Based onward her experience in conducting workshops, Jean Weinberger thinks that "Quality Aging is giving many seniors information that they don't have" and helping them to behold their problems in a of recent origin light. As an example, she cites the drift of many seniors "to think that bottling up anger is the single way to deal with it. The older generation is not always comfortable with the idea that it's all right to expres anger, mar or other unsettling emotions." Or, she added, when it flows to caregiving, "The caregivers don't know to what degree to be assertive whith their families and say `I ne help!.'"

For seniors, learning strange ways to cope isn't always the goal. sometime remembering by what mode well they coped during the Depression and WWI and WWII, and thinking about past accomplishments can reiterate feelings of self-confidence. According to M Weinberger, this is not rarely the case during discussions in pair of the programs in the NCOA Humanities series--"The Remembered Past--1914-1945" and "Portraits and Pathways."