“Houston, we have a problem!”
For many of us who have had professions in the senior living or healthcare sector for many years, I think few people will disagree that there continues to be ongoing significant challenges within those industries.
Several of those challenges are related to the hiring of staff, the retention of staff, financial concerns for many parties, including community owners and operators, residents and their families, community staff members, as well a myriad of ongoing stresses for everyone who ultimately is trying so hard to provide a happy and healthy lifestyle for our aging population. For those directly or indirectly involved in helping people age longer in place at home, those same challenges eerily mirror one another.
Individually, most of us in this now-gelled space have big hearts and are caring people with good intentions. But is it just me, or do you sometimes feel that, as a whole, we are improving wide-scale clinical and social outcomes at a snail’s pace, if at all?
I am curious as to how many others who are pondering the big-picture problems that are facing our aging population today sometimes feel as if we have a snowball full of hiccups that is getting bigger and bigger. The snowball is picking up steam as it is coming down the mountain. It is moving faster and faster, with the fluffy white clouds in our sky’s background looking a little bit grayer.
How do we see more white clouds in the distance? How do we tackle the snowball? How do we become more proactive in our approach to providing better care for both older adults and ourselves?
I think the answer may lie somewhere between education, teaching more young children how to play chess, and being able to understand ripple effects of our individual actions to solve problems more effectively from a big-picture view.
Whew! That’s a lot to digest in one sentence. Let me explain.
When I was younger, my older sister taught me how to play chess. Although I don’t know exactly what age it was when I learned how to play the game, I do know that it had to have been while I was in elementary school. I know this because we lived in a small cape cod-style home with a staircase on the first floor that led to the upstairs second floor. My sister’s bedroom was on the left, and my bedroom was on the right. We laid the chess board down on the small upstairs landing space that divided our two tiny rooms to quietly play the game with one another at night. In hindsight, we probably should have been sleeping as per our parents’ bedtime rules.
Fast forward to adulthood, and I taught both of my two sons to play chess when, give or take, when they were around the ages of 7 and 10 years old. It is the only game that I never let them win until they truly beat me on their own. Chutes and Ladders, Sorry, Uno, Operation, Go Fish and several others were the games that even if they didn’t legitimately win, I had no issue in crowning my boys “the winner.”
But the game of chess, to me, is much different than many other card and board games, because when you learn how to play chess, and when you finally understand the game enough to win it, the feeling is an overwhelming one of excitement that feels like endorphins on steroids being released into your brain.
Chess is a game of strategy. To become a good chess player, you must think beyond your individual move, and you must think how your move may affect the move of your opponent. The more moves you can think ahead, and the more that you understand the cause-and-effect factors of your move, the more likelihood you have of winning the game.
In a sense, what children are learning at very young age is how to see a bigger picture of cause and effect based on their own individual actions. Chess teaches players to view the entire board versus looking at only their individual pieces of the game.
Both of my sons are young adults now, and my oldest still loves playing chess. As I get older myself, I am not able to think ahead as many moves as he does, and thus it is a challenge to win against him. On the rare occasion that I do win, I still get that same exhilarating feeling that lingers for a bit in a wonderful way.
So how can teaching elementary school age children to play chess help solve some of the challenges that we are experiencing currently in the senior living and healthcare space?
In the senior living and healthcare industries, unfortunately many roles are still task-based, with departments often being siloed from one other. Many people struggle to see the big picture, the cause-and-effect, the ripple effects, so to speak, of their “moves.”
Let me share an example. In my professional world, I work with a team of incontinence experts who each day visit with consumers, senior living community employees and healthcare professionals to educate them about the importance of choosing high-quality incontinence products, either for themselves or for people for whom they are caring who are living with the chronic condition of urinary incontinence.
Choosing products that are fully breathable, have inner leak guards, are super absorbent and are made of soft materials for comfort will allow people with incontinence maintain skin integrity, reduce the risk of urinary tract infections, reduce the risk of falls and reduce stress for caregivers. High-performing products may cost a few pennies more per individual product piece than other, lower-performing products on the market. When overall value is understood by the buyers of these products, however, quite often they come to realize that the ripple effects of using high-performing products often will lead to both better outcomes and a reduction of overall costs. The cause-and-effect of making the move to transition to high-performing incontinence products ripples out to a much bigger picture.
On the flip side, if a decision-maker is only looking at the price per product piece, rather than the overall high value, then he or she is more likely to have less favorable outcomes and increase overall costs. In a sense, those buyers are unlikely to “win the game.”
Much like the game of chess, if more people are taught early on to understand ripple effects, I believe that we would have improved outcomes in more clinical and social aspects related to care — far beyond my one incontinence products example.
I often think about children nationwide as young as 6, 8 or 10 years old learning to play chess. Although it would take some time, imagine what the future of senior living and healthcare might look like in 10 years if more kids are taught to play the game. Imagine what clinical and social outcomes might look like if more people understood the bigger picture and provided care based on a deep understanding of how their individual actions affect another resident, another patient, another teammate or another department.
At a minimum, I think many of us will agree on a couple of things with this approach. The first is that children who learn to play chess no doubt will develop their strategic skills in some capacity. For those who seek a profession in the senior living or healthcare space, I think we also can agree that when we compare understanding the game of chess to providing better quality of care, individual pieces are easily pushed off the board to the side. Once you understand the entire board, however, winning, in fact, is a culmination of all the pieces playing together in tandem.
Learn chess. Play chess!
Deanna Vigliotta is the national sales manager for Seni premium adult incontinence products and has a 30-year background in healthcare sales and sales management. She joined Seni in early 2019 to help expand the brand presence on the US market and to educate consumers, healthcare professionals and senior living communities about the importance of choosing high-quality, fully breathable products.
The opinions expressed in each McKnight’s Senior Living marketplace column are those of the author and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Senior Living.
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