Non-Profit Business Helps Seniors Stay Independent In Their Homes:

Fundraiser at Quail Lodge & Golf Resort Set For August 8, 2015, A Royal Ball: A Proclamation For Change

Hands to Help Seniors, a non-profit agency located in Monterey, CA, is committed to serve the growing need of seniors seeking financial help in Monterey County.  Founded by Richard Kuehn, the owner of Family inHome Caregiving of Monterey--a company which provides services to help seniors remain in their own homes and independent--Hands to Help Seniors is here to help those who can't afford to stay in their own homes and remain independent.  It is providing a breadth and depth of services which is unprecedented for a non-profit, from putting a new roof on a senior's home to helping them with hospital bills. 

 H2HS has set the date for its gala event, A Royal Ball: A Proclamation For Change for August 8.  This will be held at Quail Lodge & Golf Reseort with a wine reception and silent auction at 6:30.  This will be followed by a 3-course dinner where Hands To Help Seniors volunteers will explain their vision for helping seniors in financial need all over the Monterey Peninsula.  Tickets are $150 and can be purchased at www.h2hs.org/2015Gala.html.

 We are here to help and hopefully alleviate some of the problems that seniors have suffered from recently after a rash of government budget cuts to senior services at both the state and federal levels.  In order to carry out our mission, we need your support. 

 Hands to Help Seniors provides an affordable assistance program for older individuals or couples to help them manage their needs so they may stay as independent as possible.  About 70% of seniors living on less than $18K per year in Monterey County don't qualify for public assistance, a sad situation.  Please help them if you can.

 We are here to help.  When a potential client calls the company, if they are financially qualified, Hands to Help Seniors will arrange a meeting with the senior and his or her family to discuss what services are needed.  “The company will then determine what financial assistance is needed for them to meet their goals and provide them with an overview of how Hands to Help Seniors may be able to help,” Mr. Kuehn said.  The non-profit has already raised over $100,000 in its first five years of existence

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There have been remarkable advances in health care technology in recent years and I was happy to read in The New York Times today that the number of deaths from heart attacks has declined 38% over the past decade.  Part of the reason for this, however, isn’t technology driven.  It was something simple—a common sense treatment plan led by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.  The new protocol is that paramedics immediately hook up patients to an electrocardiogram in the ambulance so that by the time they arrive at the hospital physicians know how bad the heart attack is and have already laid out a plan of treatment.  With strokes and heart attacks, minutes count.  Thanks to these two great organizations for pointing this out and enabling hospitals to react more quickly when they have a person with a potentially fatal condition coming in.

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The Carmel Foundation has a number of classes and free activities, including a walking group which meets every Tuesday from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m.  Get some exercise and meet some new friends.  The leader is Kari Martorella who will take you to local paths, beaches and parks.  To register, call Kari at 620-8706.

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Chronic pain is tricky.  You want to feel better but exercising without taking some type of painkiller can be a tough slog.  Typically, doctors ask patients to measure pain on a scale of 1 to 10, but this unscientific method is now being called into question.  One woman, Tamara Michel, who suffers from chronic pain caused by Multiple Sclerosis, became frustrated by this simple scale and asked her nurse exactly what a 10 should translate into.  The nurse told her that she considered a 10 to be comparable to a toothache so bad that you need to see the dentist the same day.  “Then I’m a 15 on that kind of scale,” she replied.  Kudos to her for working with a team of researchers in order to develop a new way to measure pain.  It focuses on how often pain prevents someone with chronic pain from preparing a meal, folding laundry, loading the dishwasher and dealing with other daily tasks.  The scale was published in the Open Research Exchange’s public library and is available to researchers, patients and doctors for free.  They can then adapt it so that it fits your particular needs.

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Many health care providers are struggling with new Medicare rules and recent data shows that a whopping 40% of health-care providers are going to have their payments docked by 1.5% this year because they didn’t submit data on patients’ health to the government.  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that more than 460,000 providers out of 1.25 million failed to comply with the Physician Quality Reporting System in 2013. This should make them pay more attention to Medicare guidelines as reimbursement rates are already low.

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