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This Older Americans Month, Let’s Celebrate the Strength of our Geriatrics Community

By Nancy Lundebjerg posted 05-05-2021 10:24 AM

  
May is Older Americans Month (OAM). Led by the Administration for Community Living (ACL), OAM is a time to encourage and recognize the countless contributions that older people and their networks make to our communities. This year’s theme is "Communities of Strength,” reflecting the resilience of older Americans with a special emphasis on the power of connection in building strong communities.

This May, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) is celebrating the strength of our geriatrics community and the ways in which individually and collectively you support older Americans to maintain their function and independence as they age. All of you, our members, have been on the frontlines of caring for older Americans across settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the spring and summer of 2020, you redesigned how you care for older Americans in your communities. Those of you pursuing academic careers redesigned educational programs to accommodate the lack of in-person experiences and revised timelines for research to reflect pandemic restrictions. You grappled with the crisis of social isolation among older adults, using approaches that ranged from implementing check-in calls with your patients to enlisting health professional students and others to visit with older adults virtually.

Even as you redesigned your clinical practice, juggled new work and personal responsibilities created by the pandemic, and cared for older patients at greatest risk of severe complications from COVID-19, you extended a helping hand to other members by responding to questions on MyAGSOnline, leading webinars, and collaborating with AGS staff on position and policy statements. You did so with the joy that comes from helping others. Whether the request was for lessons learned or for a helping hand to lift someone up, you were there for other members—ready to share your successes, your challenges, and perhaps, most importantly, your own journeys.

Throughout the pandemic, you have been the physical embodiment of this year’s theme, reflecting a collective strength and resilience in the face of a pandemic that took an inconceivable toll on the older Americans that you collectively care for. Since the advent of the COVID-19 vaccines, those of you who are on social media have been sharing your joy at receiving your first shot and how you trust in the science that brought us not one, but three vaccines in the U.S. You’ve done this in service of the larger national goal to encourage all of us to get vaccinated when our turn comes. I can’t begin to describe the joy the AGS staff team took in seeing those pictures and posts filling our own social media feeds. Suffice it to say, we breathed a collective sigh of relief that you were safer than you had been before. These days, you’ve been sharing your insights into addressing vaccine hesitancy and reaching homebound older adults with vaccines through innovative partnerships. Those of you who work in long-term care have been rolling up your sleeves to safely reunite the older adults in your care with their families and loved ones. This latest—and hopefully last—phase of the pandemic has been filled with hope and joy as we look toward a future that will be different from our past because of what we’ve learned from this past year.

One lesson we learned is the value of a community that is not defined by physical boundaries but rather spans time zones and continents. Our virtual community has allowed us to support each other throughout the pandemic. Seeing each other on Zoom calls, joining webinars, and keeping in touch via phone, text, and email has helped to get us through this year of being together yet apart. Among our staff, we used our Microsoft Teams channel to share recommendations for the best TV shows to binge, books to read, funniest GIFS, and, in the early days, ways we were coping with living and working from home (some of us with kids and partners underfoot). This week, we’ve been sharing recommendations for the “#AGS21 from Home” Spotify playlist.

I am a firm believer that we strengthen our community by sharing our stories and, perhaps most importantly, sharing what brings us joy or helps to give us the resilience to carry on through the year that we just experienced. If you were to think about this past year, what gave you joy or helped to get you through the day? Was it learning a new recipe for bread, taking your morning run, or having a quiet moment to read to your children or call your parents? Was it helping someone else to get through a rough patch or seeing colleagues near and far during a Zoom cocktail hour?

As we look ahead to next week’s annual meeting, we are inviting AGS members to share their stories on the themes of joy and strength. And if that story includes a really good crockpot recipe, I’m hoping you will share that, too! If you’re posting to Twitter or Facebook, please tag our handle, @amergeriatrics, and use the hashtag #OAM2021, or you can simply respond to this post in MyAGSOnline. Let’s celebrate together what got us through this past year—not the least of which was the strength of our geriatrics community. ​​
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