Sensitivity Program Puts Workers in Elderly’s Shoes

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — An aging person can face the loss of sight, hearing, mobility or physical power, but the loss of dignity may be the most painful.

Julie Luthy, for example, sat tied into a wheelchair as people stood beside her and ignored her. She said they talked about her and made decisions about her future, all without a glance in her direction.

“Nobody’d listen to me,” she said. “They would not give you any eye contact.”

Luthy is 38 years old and a nurse at St. Francis Hospital. But she was playing the role of a 75-year-old retired veterinarian during a sensitivity training program.

Luthy works in surgery, where many patients over 65 are treated for arthritic joints or bone fractures.

“I didn’t realize how degrading some things can be,” she said.

Luthy was one of 500 hospital employees who took a few gingerly footsteps in the shoes of the aged in the hospital’s AgeSense program.

Mary Williams, director of the hospital’s ElderMed unit, said the program lets hospital workers feel some of the pangs the elderly feel when they lose their independence to failing health.

In a recent session, participants had their fingers and wrists hobbled with splints. They were fed bland food and drink to simulate the dulled sense of taste many senior citizens experience. They had their vision or hearing impaired, and they were subjected to other indignities.

“They told us to pick our three most treasured possessions, then they took them away,” Luthy said. “You’d be restrained in a chair all day long.”

“What they did was totally ignore me,” said Amy Campbell, 37, another surgical nurse who adopted the role of a 79-year-old retired nurse.

“They called me ugly. It really began to bother me. They just took away my dignity and my pride,” she said.

Janet Jones, 32, a nursing assistant in the hospital’s lung unit, played a 65-year-old retired baker who was blind and hearing-impaired.

“They just wouldn’t listen. They would hurry you along like a herd of cattle,” she said.

That neglect proved fatal to the role she was playing.

“I choked to death on baby food,” she said.

Luthy said that people are often conditioned to treat impaired senior citizens like children, no matter what the person’s achievements.