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Community Service

Community Service
Central Orange Adult Day Health Center
For many years, Carol Woods has supported the Central Orange Adult Day Health Center of Orange County, a therapeutic day program for older adults with disabilities that is currently licensed to serve 10 participants. The program enables residents with significant health concerns to live at home as long as possible. The Orange County Board of Commissioners has agreed to build a larger facility, and Carol Woods committed to donate a total of $175,000 over three years to help with the capital cost. The new facility will have the capacity to serve 30 participants, and opened in early 2009.

Jack Chestnut, Carol Woods' Director of Community Contacts, and Ken Reeb, Jr., Vice President of Finance, serve on the Board for the Adult Day Health Center and have been instrumental in providing their professional expertise and support to this program.

Coalition for Continuity of Care in the Geriatric Community
The Continuity of Care Coalition is a representative body of providers, consumers, leaders, and public officials concerned with or involved in meeting the needs of older adults. The Coalition provides a forum for identifying unmet needs of older adults. It advocates for and supports the process of change to get the needs met and it monitors the process of change as it happens. The Coalition was co-founded by Carol Woods in 1992 and has been active ever since.

Over the years, the Coalition has been instrumental in such areas as the UNC Institute on Aging development and agenda; geriatric unit at UNC hospitals; legislative strategies, Emergency Care Department of UNC and usage by elders; Hospice care; Mobile Dental Access; Meals on Wheels; Transportation; Prescription Bill; PACE program and Piedmont Health; Preventive Home Visit Grant and many others.

Community Connections for Seniors Grant
The Duke Endowment funded a three-year grant (2008-2010) for Carol Woods to develop a model of innovative, collaborative, community-based services for seniors - a model that can be duplicated throughout the state and the nation. In addition to service delivery, the grant also focuses on workforce development and policy and planning. Carol Woods provides the leadership on this grant. We embarked on this grant out of concern for the demographic change in North Carolina, the fragmentation of the current system, the lack of a payment structure, the lack of future work force and the devastating effect these factors will have on North Carolina if not addressed. Heather Altman, former Director of Well-Being at Carol Woods, is the Project Director for the grant.

Project initiatives have brought together more than 40 organizations in Orange County and partnered with neighboring Chatham County to create the Chatham-Orange Community Resource Connections for Aging and Disabilities. This is a North Carolina and national initiative to streamline information, assistance and access to long term services and supports.  In 2010, Community Connections and community partners will help develop a Person-Centered Hospital Discharge Planning Model in conjunction with a national grant through the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

The Community Connections staff and Carol Woods’ CEO have hosted and presented at numerous conferences with local, statewide and national providers, policymakers and planners, discussing aging services, transitional care, community partnerships, technology, workforce issues, and long term care policy and planning.  In 2010, Pat Sprigg was appointed to the North Carolina Study Commission on Aging to shape future legislation and align initiatives.

Orange County Master Aging Plan
The Master Aging Plan (MAP) is a county commissioner approved, five-year, planning document for older adults in Orange County. Carol Woods was instrumental in the development of this plan. The intent of the plan is to develop a comprehensive and coordinated delivery of community service to older persons who have different levels of functional capacity, strives to integrate the private and public resources, and moves the county toward planning aging-friendly communities as part of the smart growth policy.

Orange county will experience a population explosion of older persons (113% increase by 2020). Carol Woods is involved as part of its greater mission to the community at large. Services are currently fragmented, new developments are not being planned with an eye to aging in place and the country is overlooking a natural resource -- retirees. Carol Woods is participating in several of the initiatives including the mobile dental access unit, adult day health center, transitional care, and information access (In Praise of Age). Pat Sprigg, President and CEO of Carol Woods, co-chairs the coalition.

National Transition of Care Coalition
Carol Woods is involved at the national level in the hope of improving transitions for elderly individuals. Every long-term care provider, many acute care providers, and numerous families of the frail elderly have personal stories how older people get lost when trying to navigate the emergency room, acute care, post-acute care, and long-term care. Multiple assessment protocols, duplicate paperwork and processes, multiple medical records, ineffective triage, professionals who do not have a trained eye for the intricacies of geriatric-related conditions frequently result in system-induced quality problems, wasteful expenditure of resources, and family frustration vented through the courts.

Pat Sprigg, Carol Woods President and CEO, has been working with the coalition since the beginning of 2007. In August 2008, Carol Woods hosted an Information Exchange on Transitional Care co-sponsored with the National Transitions of Care Coalition. Over 100 service providers, advocates and consumers participated.