Inside Assisted Living

May 11, 2009
The authors—researchers and academics with the Center for Aging Studies at the Erickson School and with the University of Maryland—spent five years studying life in six Baltimore-area assisted-living facilities. These ranged from an eight-resident home owned by two sisters to a 112-person residential-care facility that is part of a for-profit corporation. The book offers excerpts from interviews with residents, family members and staff. While it can illuminate in depth many of the issues in assisted-care living, its primary audience should be readers with a professional or policy interest in care for the aged.

May 1, 2009
Many people have firsthand knowledge of assisted living through visiting aging family members and friends, evaluating options for a relative in need of care, or engaging in difficult conversations with parents about their wishes "when the time comes." This book moves beyond individual perceptions and prejudices to summarize a comprehensive ethnographic study of six varied assisted-living facilities. Over a five-year span, researchers and scholars from the Center for Aging Studies at the Erickson School and Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, performed extensive interviews and observations of residents, family members, administrators, and staff at the selected institutions, identifying a representative patient at each for particular attention. The institutions, all in the Baltimore area, ranged from a small privately run home for six residents to an up-scale facility housing 100. Eckert (director of the center) and his team have done an outstanding job of distilling their research into a readable and perceptive overview of the assisted-living experience. Their study compassionately delineates the competing values of desires of residents for independence, needs of family members for reassurance about of their relatives' safety, concerns of staff about their low salaries and working conditions, and the needs of owners and operators to preserve financial viability in the face of increasing regulatory demands and liability costs. As the experiences of the patients reveal, most care decisions are made in response to medical emergencies rather than through careful planning. Not a how-to guide for time-pressured family members or guardians, this book provides a scholarly and, happily, generally positive view of the assisted-living experience. Potentially invaluable to thoughtful readers in geriatrics, sociology, and medical policy; highly recommended.Kathy Arsenault, St. Petersburg, FL

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