This past Thursday evening, I volunteered at a local nursing home to assist with an event called “Dance and Stroll with Seniors.” Excited to continue on my path of assisting senior citizens, I began my service: I was to transport residents from their rooms to an assembly room. For the first thirty minutes, I conversed with the residents as I escorted them to the dancing event. Soon, voices, bodies, and music filled the room, which was equipped with a speaker and projector to display and play songs by Michael Jackson. From start to finish, I saw a change in each resident. In their rooms, they seemed lonely and reserved, but after conversing and dancing, their moods were substantially improved. This experience solidified my belief in human connection as a tool to bring out the best in people, especially elders who live alone in nursing homes.
Far too many nursing home residents lack access to social interaction, can improve the brain’s capacity to resist damage. This research-backed information should be reflected in the policies that shape the experience of senior citizens, as implementations of social interaction can help elders build resistance against disorders like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Possible policy actions and their prospective policy analyses are as follows:
- An indirect policy option: Creating and posting various posters in nursing homes stressing the need for social interaction for senior citizens, its benefit on cognitive reserve, and its ability to protect the aging brain from degeneration.
- Efficient, financially feasible, and politically feasible, raises awareness, and hopes to increase the amount of social interaction seniors engage in.
- A direct policy option: Mandating at least 1-2 hours per day of social interaction in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, helping provide cognitive benefit for seniors.
- Somewhat efficient (the question remains of who will volunteer to interact with seniors), financially feasible, politically feasible, would improve the cognitive health of seniors, and could possibly widen discrepancies between those in nursing homes and not.
- Remaining under the status quo
- This course of action would not necessarily raise the rate and severity of cognitive degeneration among the aging population, but it would not make any effort to hinder this danger.
Brains for Change 