'Almost like part of the family'

Senior's 'cluster care' community keeps her out of hospital and long-term care

- MOIRA WELSH

Supervisor Maxine Russell, back, with Susan Vickberg at her cluster care home at WoodGreen Community Centre in East Toronto, where she gets 24-hour care from a PSW, as well as a social worker who can help her navigate the system.

Susan Vickberg has what many do not.

At the age of 71, living with multiple sclerosis, Vickberg has a private room inside a "cluster-care" household for older adults at WoodGreen Community Services on Queen Street East with - and this is the important part an inhouse supervisor plus 24-hour-aday help from the same personalsupport workers (PSW) she has known for years.

"It's almost like having a mother," Vickberg said. "Somebody cares about you and that is an emotionally positive experience - you lose that sense of loneliness."

Familiarity with workers, she believes, keeps her safe, strong and out of long-term care or hospitals. The not-for-profit WoodGreen says 75 per cent of its older renters in six sites across Toronto remain in cluster care until the end of life, avoiding nursing homes.

And while Wood Green's purposebuilt households are not the Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) increasingly found in condos and apartments, their in-house supports offer a prototype for new NORC-focused home care services, said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics for Sinai Health and University Health Network (UHN).

"Most people living in the thousands of (NORC) buildings don't have anything like this, but imagine if we could take the government-funded home care and offer something similar to cluster care in these buildings," Sinha said.

A new report released Tuesday by the NORC Innovation Centre at UHN is calling on the province to modernize its home-care delivery by streamlining services in the population-dense NORCS, which are multi-generational buildings where many people have, naturally, aged in place.