Assisted Living at RiverMead: Independent But Not Alone

Written by Dan Moore, Assisted Living Transition Counselor

As we age, there’s no shortage of challenges seniors face when it comes to staying connected to the larger community. Faced with diminished mobility and lack of transportation options, along with the inevitable loss of family and friends in their social circle. Maintaining a strong base of human relationships and a wide sense of community can be difficult. When discussing the importance of community and where it fits in a senior’s life, here are a couple of facts to consider: 

• It has been found that the broader a person’s social circle, there is a direct influence on their physical resilience; ranging from resistance to catching a cold to the impact it has on the course of significant disease processes. 
• A study of 4,000 women with breast cancer, which took a comprehensive look at their lifestyles, showed that the greatest predictor of survival over a 10-year period was the size of their in-person social networks. 
• People with active, in-person social lives demonstrate a lifespan advantage of up to 15 years. 
• Social contact is an even more significant predictor of health and longevity than physical exercise or even whether a person smokes. 

• Social contact is a powerful biological indicator of how well people can think, remember facts, and delay the onset of neurologic deficits, such as dementia. 
• In almost all developed countries around the world, women live longer than men on average of 5-7 years, and a major contributing factor to this is demonstrated by women having a much more robust social circle. 

  

We need not look back any further than to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown to demonstrate the importance of having a community that we can rely on to support us when the going is tough. The contribution community plays in a senior’s life is critical to healthy aging and the capacity to thrive. One advantage to becoming a resident in a Senior Lifecare Community is the network of neighbors and friends you will see and interact with daily through shared dining experiences, living near each other, participating in activities and hobbies together, and making changes on various resident-run committees. 

These opportunities and experiences are markedly different from a senior who remains at home, frequently alone and needing to depend on others for reasons such as lack of mobility, cognitive decline, inability to drive, vision limitations, etc. This is not to say that remaining at home isn’t right for everyone. It does highlight some of the reasons why it is hard for seniors to thrive, or maintain a social support network, potentially leading to isolation, depression, and a severely diminished quality of life. 

Belonging to a community is much more than simply living around a group of other people. Belonging to a community is about sharing an emotional bond with others through friendship, shared experiences, and access to a shared support system. Living in a Lifecare community takes this one step further and provides you with a component of physical support, whether through the dining services and the maintenance of physical structures or the need for personal assistance from aids, nursing, or therapy.