Dr. Bill Thomas featured in The New York Times

Thomas discusses his exciting new ideas about improving life for older adults in column on Rethinking Old Age

CONTACT: Kavan Peterson
Office: 410-455-1896
Cellphone: 443-739-3052
kavan@umbc.edu

BALTIMORE Dr. Bill Thomas, an innovative authority on eldercare recently named Professor of Aging Services at the Erickson School at UMBC, was featured in The New York Times on May 24 in a column titled Rethinking Old Age.

Guest-columnist Atul Gawande explored why older adults should demand a life of engagement and fulfillment even after they can no longer live independently. He highlights Dr. Thomas efforts to radically change living conditions for older adults:

Bill Thomas, for example, is a geriatrician who calls himself a ''nursing home abolitionist'' and built the first Green Houses in Tupelo, Miss. These are houses for no more than 10 residents, equipped with a kitchen and living room at its center, not a nurse's station, and personal furnishings. The bedrooms are private. Residents help one another with cooking and other work as they are able. Staff members provide not just nursing care but also mentoring for engaging in daily life, even for Alzheimer's patients. And the homes meet all federal safety guidelines and work within state-reimbursement levels.

They have been a great success. Dr. Thomas is now building Green Houses in every state in the country with funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Such experiments, however, represent only a tiny fraction of the 18,000 nursing homes nationwide.

'The No. 1 problem I see, Dr. Thomas told me, is that people believe what we have in old age is as good as we can expect.' As a result, families don't press nursing homes with hard questions like, 'How do you plan to change in the next year?' But we should, if we want to hope for something more than safety in our old age.

About Dr. Bill Thomas

Dr. Bill Thomas is a Professor at the Erickson School. A Harvard-educated physician and international authority on geriatric medicine and eldercare, he is one of the nations most outspoken advocates for improving care for older adults. He is the founder of The Eden Alternative and the Green House, a radically new approach to long-term care. Winner of the Americas Award and named as an AARP Visiting Scholar in 2005, his most recent book, What Are Old People For? How Elders Will Save the World, won Book of the Year honors from the American Medical Writers Association.