This past Thursday evening, I volunteered at a local nursing home to assist with an event called "Dance and Stroll with Seniors." Unsure about what I would be tasked with doing but excited to continue on my path of advocating and assisting senior citizens, I arrived at the nursing home and began my service: I was to visit each floor of the nursing home and transport residents from their rooms to an assembly room. For the first thirty minutes, I moved back and forth between the floors of the complex and the assembly room, conversing with the residents and escorting 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. Each volunteer then took a resident out for a spin across the dance floor, wheeling the residents forwards and backwards and twirling around others while interacting with their new friends. From start to finish, the change I saw in each resident was profound. In their rooms, the residents seemed lonely and reserved, but after conversing with, meeting, and dancing with new people and even their own neighbors, their moods were substantially improved, revealing bubbly, lively, and kind people. This experience solidified my belief in human connection as a tool to better people's lives, especially for the many elders who live solitarily in nursing homes, far away from their loved ones.
Far too many senior citizens and nursing home residents lack access to social interaction, which research suggests improves 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—especially those in nursing homes—to build resistance against disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
Possible policy actions and their prospective policy analyses are as follows:
- An indirect policy option could entail creating and posting various posters throughout nursing homes that stress the importance of social interaction for senior citizens, its benefit on cognitive reserve, and its ability to protect the aging brain from neurodegeneration
- Efficient, financially feasible, and politically feasible, raises awareness, and hopes to increase the amount of social interaction seniors engage in
- A direct policy option would include 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 neurodegeneration among the aging population, but it would not make any effort to hinder this danger.