A third (35%) of Virginia business leaders feel that the impending retirement of a large number of workers in the future will have a significant impact on their company. Source: 2008 Older Dominion Project Business Leaders' Study
Age Wave Resources
Dr. Lindsay and the Shared Database
First, Start with the Facts
Dick Lindsay practices what he preaches.
At 75 years old, the retired head of the University of Virginia’s division of geriatric medicine travels around the country on a mission: to persuade older Americans to modify their lifestyles to enjoy better health and a better quality of life. Exercise more, he urges. Eat healthier food. Get active – pursue personal interests and spend time with other people.
That advice comes naturally to Lindsay. A former Olympic-hopeful skier, Lindsay packs in enough exercise for two or three people half his age. He works out at the gym three times a week where, he says, he “pumps iron.” He takes long walks and plays tennis. In winter, he skis; in summer he swims. He also stays busy. He teaches a summer course for minority students at UVa, and serves on the boards of five organizations doing work relating to aging, including the Older Dominion Partnership. Oh, and in his spare time, he’s an aviation photographer who has been publishing a calendar of vintage warplanes for the past 15 years.
“He’s incredibly energetic,” says Ed Ansello, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who serves with the New York native on the board of the Virginia Center on Aging and frequently recruits him as a speaker. “He talks fast. We joke that you get an hour and a half lecture in 45 minutes.”
Lindsay is living, breathing proof that advancing years need not entail slowing down mentally or physically. And he’s applying his energy to adding at least one more accomplishment to his list of career achievements. He wants to build a statewide research database to guide Virginians in mobilizing resources for the impending age wave. “The data is essential,” he says. “To make plans without data makes no sense at all.”
As chair of the research database work group, Lindsay leads one of the most important initiatives of the Older Dominion Project. Virginia is flying blind in its aging policy, relying mainly upon U.S. Census data, which tell us how many people there are in the over-65 population and how many there will be in the future, but not a whole lot more. The last detailed survey of older Virginians took place 30 years ago under the auspices of the Virginia Center on Aging, and advocates of the elderly have been unable to raise any public funding since.
Older Virginians have a host of special problems relating to personal finances, health care, transportation, social isolation and care giving. But the scope and magnitude of those problems in different communities is not known with any certainty. Says Lindsay: “When it gets down to the community level, we need to know how ready we are to deal with these problems.”
Building readiness, of course, is what the Older Dominion Partnership is all about. The ODP establishes a collaborative forum where government, business, foundations, not-for-profits and academia can pool resources and exchange ideas for preparing for the age wave. Because a shared database is so essential, the ODP is raising money for research, starting in the Richmond region, which a cash-strapped state government is in no position to provide right now.
Physicians in the Family
Lindsay comes honestly by his passion for the health and well being of Virginia’s aging population. He was born into a family of physicians: His grandfather and his father both were general practitioners in the tiny resort town of Old Forge. Attending Cornell University and studying medicine at the New York Medical College, he returned home to help out with the family practice when his father suffered an illness. But when his father recovered, there wasn’t enough income to support two doctors, so Lindsay moved to Charlottesville to take a position on the staff of the University of Virginia medical center. Except for two years in the U.S. Army medical corps, he has remained in Virginia ever since.
After spending several years establishing UVa’s family practice, Lindsay was drawn to a new opportunity in the early 1970s. He won one of the first geriatric medicine academic awards from the National Institute of Aging to introduce aging into the curriculum of medical schools around the country. With NIA backing, he orchestrated the creation at the UVa medical school of one of the first five geriatrics programs in the country.
Lindsay retired in 1999 as head of that program, but he’s still passionate about training more health care practitioners in the special needs of the aging population, and he still serves on the medical school admissions committee. Everybody knows the population is aging, and everybody is talking about the kinds of services needed to cater to that population. But there is a huge problem with all those plans, he says. “It’s like putting the cart before the horse to establish new programs without having adequate manpower to staff them.”
The elderly typically represent more complex cases than the general population because they often suffer from multiple chronic diseases. Virginians can have all the good intentions in the world, but unless we can train and mobilize the manpower and give people training in geriatric medicine the system is “doomed to failure.” The problem is critical across the board, Lindsay says: not just for doctors but for nurses, dentists, pharmacists, social workers, CNAs, home health workers and the rest of the medical and care-giving professions.
“We don’t have the people, and we don’t have the training,” he says. “The system is held together with spit and bailing wire.”
Database on Aging
The training of adequate manpower is the most critical age-wave issue facing Virginia, but there are many others. Mobility is an issue for the elderly, who experience higher rates of disabilities than the general population. Unhealthy lifestyles are another issue, he says. Many older people need to change their diet and exercise more. It’s never too late to make changes that can improve health and the quality of life. On the positive side, Lindsay sees technology proving a boon to the elderly who want to maintain their independence and live in their own homes. Monitors can track everything from a person’s blood pressure to which room they’re in. Sensors can tell if someone has fallen – a leading cause of death – and need help.
It’s difficult for service providers, be they private businesses, government agencies or not-for-profits, to respond to the needs of the elderly without research data to illuminate where the needs exist.
“We want to find out things like oral health, nutrition and diet,” says Ansello, who works with Lindsay on the data research working group. What access do the elderly have to transportation? How much social contact do they enjoy? How aware are they of the services that are available? “Those are all things you can’t get from the Census.”
As the project currently stands, the Richmond Memorial Health Foundation has funded the design and construction of a research database covering the Richmond metropolitan region. The database will be designed to integrate data from other regions when additional funding become available, as Lindsay hopes it will. Several communities – Danville, Martinsville and Petersburg among them – have local foundations that were created when their community foundations were sold to for-profit hospital chains. Alternatively, businesses might help offset the expense in order to gain market data they could not afford on their own.
The database design and research of secondary sources is scheduled to be complete by June. The primary research, conducted as a survey of a large sample population, is expected to begin this summer. The data will reside on the ODP web site where it can be accessed by anyone with an interest in age wave issues. Once there’s something to show, says Lindsay, “We’ll try to convince the local fathers that what we’ve got for Richmond will work for them too.”
Lindsay is just the man to carry the message across the state. He’s the one who kept the dream of a statewide research database alive all these years, says Ansello. “Dick was the moving spirit. … He’s been the motivator. He’s kept our eye on the prize. Without him, we’d just be crying in our beer.”