By Andrew Park
A joint effort by the Stein Senior Center and
International Center for the Disabled will re-introduce a day-program aiding
those in early stages of dementia and those who care for them. The Service
Program for Adults, or SPA, will launch this summer at the agencies’ shared 340
East 24th Street building to offer supervised socialization and
dementia-specific activities for the first time since ICD closed a similar
program in 1993. “I was unlucky enough to have to close it in 1993 and it was
one of the saddest days in my life,” said Stein Senior Center executive
director Jane Barry, who coincidentally ran the former ICD Alzheimer’s program.
“The SPA program is the first social adult day-program for
dementia and I’m very excited about it,” Barry said.
SPA will hold classes in music, the arts and in exercise
led by volunteers and current Stein Senior Center teachers. The program will
also incorporate some new age approaches to combat dementia through meditation
movements and cooking classes. Research has found meditation to increase and
strengthen an area of the brain associated with learning and memory, said
Stein’s meditation teacher, Jacquie McArdle. In any case, classes such as
meditation will also be extended to caregivers as a major aspect of SPA.
“I’m sure there is a lot of stress involved with what
caregivers are doing and meditation reduces stress. It would be nice to give
them a tool to help them, a place to come to practice meditation and then use
that when they need to take a deep breath,” McArdle said. Caregivers will also
be free to join a support group and receive counseling as SPA will also link up
caregivers with NYU
Langone Medical
Center’s extensive
advisory services.
For the coming program, ICD will extend access to its
space and staff specializing in speech and language, mental health, and cognitive
impairment therapies to complement the regular classes. With an aging
population fostering a growing number of people with dementia with fewer
resources, the need for a local program such as SPA runs high, said ICD’s
director of development, Sondra Segal.
“For a period of time there were both social and medical
day-programs for people with Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia but a
number of those have been closed and there are very few programs around,” she
said.
ICD, an outpatient rehabilitation facility founded in
1917, has served more than a quarter-million people since it inception and its
former program geared for Alzheimer’s disease patients ran for over 20 years.
SPA is expected to begin early June on Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week from
1:30–4:30 p.m.
Close to 70 guests including elected officials attended a
kick-off party for SPA on Friday, April 3.
“This center—the
Stein Senior Center—in so many ways epitomizes what’s possible in a place like
this,” Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh said. “It’s got all the right
ingredients.”
Source:
Town & Village