Everything for Aging. All in One Place.
By David Dunkelman, 
President and Chief Executive Officer

Quietly and swiftly, the aging experience changed.

Not many years ago, aging meant a short, quick demise, a simple one-dimensional “lost” period at the very end of life. Aging today has expanded – evolved into a full, three-dimensional time of new possibilities. Where aging used to be dreaded, predetermined, an absolute course of loss, now it has become an experience to be managed, if not actively controlled.

All around us, society is recognizing the aging age. But, paradoxically, the long-term care field has been slow to adjust to the new reality, and care providers have been slow to respond to the changing needs of the elderly.

At Weinberg Campus, we know that we first need to understand the aging experience to be able to address an individual’s needs throughout the aging age.

For example, we now understand that chronological age is not the best way to classify or understand aging. The defining factor, for most people, is health, and there are four ways to measure it:

• Physical
• Cognitive
• Economic
• Emotional

Many people who have the opportunity to live to a very old age experience various rates of loss within these four domains. Throughout life, our bodies, minds, and memory, and our financial resources change. And, if we lose our emotional resources, the others can be of little value to us.

It is the constantly changing gains and losses within these four health domains that create the complexity and the dilemma of responding to older people’s very individual, very unique, and frequently changing needs. The variety, the order, the direction, and the way these limitations impact each other are highly individual — no two people experience them exactly the same way.

In order to address these individual realities of aging and adapt as an older person’s needs change, Weinberg Campus designed buildings, settings, programs, and interventions that are constantly measured and adjusted to meet the variable needs of individuals.

Each of the components of Weinberg Campus is best in class, but it is the range of them that really enhances the aging experience.

There are eight living environments at Weinberg Campus, from independent senior apartments to an assisted living program, a nursing home, rehab, and day programs. In all, we have nearly 750 residents and tenants living in our 130-acre Campus community, many of whom live for years in three to five different specialized settings wrapped in the security of our single, multi-layered program.

In today’s aging age, no single place — nursing home, adult home, assisted living program, apartment, home care, or day care — can possibly provide the continuity people seek in their frail years. In standalone settings, many people’s changing needs are inappropriately, ineffectively, or belatedly addressed. The resulting confusion, decline, and disruption can be devastating to the older person and his or her family.

At Weinberg Campus, our goal is to do nothing less than respond quickly and appropriately to the new realities of aging for rich or poor, well to very frail, and at all the various way stations along an individual’s aging age.