If you’re caring for an elderly relative, you know how difficult it can be—especially if your loved one has health issues. Or perhaps you know a frail senior who needs help, but has no one to care for them. Now neither the senior nor the caregiver has to go it alone.
Thanks to the new TRU PACE program offered by Lafayette’s TRU Community Care, eligible Boulder County seniors 55 and older can receive coordinated care that includes physical, social, psychological, therapeutic and other care that allows them to remain independent for as long as safely possible.
TRU PACE (Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly) is part of a national program that offers a high care level and improved life quality for seniors. When the Lafayette TRU PACE center opens this fall, it will transport Boulder County PACE participants to and from the new Lafayette facility at 2593 Park Lane, which houses a primary-care clinic, a rehabilitation gym and a day-activities center. At the facility, seniors can interact with peers, play games, do crafts, eat meals, and receive medical evaluations, checkups, medications, baths and other services from an interdisciplinary team of health-care professionals. The program also sends caretakers to participants’ homes to help with cleaning, cooking and other tasks.
To qualify for the free services, TRU PACE participants must be Medicare and Medicaid eligible, and certified by the state as nursing-home eligible. (Medicaid-ineligible participants can pay that portion of the cost, provided they are Medicare and nursing-home eligible.) Although PACE participants must need nursing-home care, only 7 percent of the national participants are in a nursing home. The PACE goal is to help frail seniors remain independent in their own homes for as long as possible.
The local PACE website launches sometime this fall, but you can visit the national website at www.npaonline.org.
