Anne Byron Waud Patient and Family Resource Center for Healthy Aging
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| The center, located on the fourth floor of this academic medical center, has a comfortable welcoming environment. It has wood paneling, comfortable homelike furniture and lighting. |
Chicago, Illinois
The Anne Byron Waud Patient and Family Resource Center for Healthy Aging opened in the spring of 1999. The center serves as a resource for older adults and their families, facilitating their learning about health, aging, illness, and their exploration of ways to maintain functioning and independence.
The center, located on the fourth floor of this academic medical center, has a comfortable welcoming environment. It has wood paneling, comfortable homelike furniture and lighting. There is a collection of artwork created by older citizens from the Chicago area. Several computers with Internet access allow patients, families, and staff to access Internet-based information and communicate with family and friends by e-mail. Individual tutoring and assistance with the Internet and e-mail is available by appointment.
Staff. The Waud Center staff members are available 8:30a.m. ö 4:30p.m., Monday through Friday. A full-time director and an assistant staff the Center. The assistant spends most of her time organizing resources and teaching use of computers and the Internet. A volunteer family caregiver works in the Center fifteen hours a week, also teaching about computers and use of the Internet. He was one of the original Waud Center patrons, learning about the use of computers there. He is also a goodwill ambassador, visiting patients and encouraging visits to the Waud Center.
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| The center, located on the fourth floor of this academic medical center, has a comfortable welcoming environment. It has wood paneling, comfortable homelike furniture and lighting. |
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| In its first 13 months of operations, Waud Center staff had over 1400 assistance sessions (patron contact) with patients and families. |
In its first 13 months of operations, Waud Center staff had over 1400 assistance sessions (patron contact) with patients and families. Over 70% of patron contact occurs through telephone calls; 19% occurs through visits to the center; and 6% through email. Approximately 475 sessions were brief encounters, while 240 sessions were more in-depth assessment and counseling sessions, including completion of a formal intake. Over 680 encounters involved use of the computer. In fact, during that period, almost 200 hours of computer instruction were provided for older people and their caregivers.
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| Patient and family involvement is important at the Waud Center. Older adults and their families participated in a series of meetings to plan the center. |
Patient and family involvement is important at the Waud Center. Older adults and their families participated in a series of meetings to plan the center. Center staff believes that it is important to get a wide variety of opinions about the books within the resource center, so they created a Book Review Club as a way to have ongoing review of materials from patrons. A Writing Group also meets regularly in the Resource Center. Both clubs are well attended and enjoyed by everyone. As an additional activity, the Waud Resource Center sponsors two monthly Caregiver Support Group meetings. These meetings are open to anyone who has taken care of a friend or relative, or is planning to do so in the future.
The Waud Center also hosts two new programs called Scrapbooking and Movie Night. Scrapbooking is twice a week, two-hour sessions of scrapbooking (a deluxe photo album that includes other memorabilia). Scrapbooking is used as a tool for life review, remembering, and enhancing memories of the happiest, most memorable moments in a person's life. Some older adults create these scrapbooks with the intention of passing them along to family members.
Movie night is a different movie and pizza every Tuesday night. Patients come to movie night as a distraction, an enjoyable way to pass the time. It also gives families an activity to enjoy together, a homelike space to sit, talk, and just be together.
The Anne Byron Waud website tells about the Resource center services, online resources, caregiver support groups, ways to get involved, and related sites.