NORC

"Naturally Occurring Retirement Community"

A NORC is a "Naturally Occurring Retirement Community."

The term "NORC" has some particular legal significance to funders of social service agencies. To me, it means there are purveyors of goods and services in an area who are particularly attuned to people in various stages of retirement.

This is especially true in SW Florida where people from snowy-realms migrate for the winter, often rent for a few years and then move into a new home either in an intentionally planned retirement community or the greater naturally occurring retirement community, and eventually make the decision to transition into an "ALF" (Assisted Living Facility) or remain in their home and continue to "age-in-place."

The businesses and other resources on the following list are not necessarily designed with the handicapped in mind. Their doorways may seem a little too narrow, sometimes, and they may act on one customer's concerns about allergies to pet dander when they let an unidentified service dog get too close. Yet, they are on the list because it is our experience that they are staffed with concerned people who are used to helping everybody who shows up and while they may apologize and explain, they don't make excuses - they meet challenges and fix problems.

This is a personal list relating personal experiences. Similar to reports by organizations like Consumer's Reports and Good Housekeeping no one pays to be on this list. However, unlike those organizations, we do not conduct exhaustive laboratory tests. We trust our instincts based on our experiences during multiple encounters with the same business in the crucible of real life.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive. It would not be fair to a business to conclude, just because they are not on this list, that they are not receptive and accommodating. For example, a business may be not on this list simply because we do not know about them.

If there are NORCie businesses - businesses that you would like to have included in this list - please write to me with your contact information, their contact information, and an explanation or description of their exceptional service: Steven@247CaregivingProducts.com.

To explain further, think of Jeff Bezos writ small. At the turn of the millennium when he was putting together the team that built Amazon.com, I was working in a too-small NY apartment trying to put the pieces together myself for the Internet General Store. My awe for successful early eCommerce ventures is based on my having tried it myself. [1]

Now, Mr. Bezos publishes one of the venerable journalistic endeavors, the Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post, and I publish the NORC list.

The Bonita Springs NORC List

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Here is the NORC List for Bonita Springs:

• Mr. GrabBar

  Installs grab bars. Personable and reasonable.

• Naples Community Hospital (NCH)

  Blue Zones

  According to "Live Longer Better" in the NCH quarterly magazine Naples Health: Extraordinary Care For Life, the new "Blue Zones Project" will make our region more "NORCie" - more conscious of healthy decisions and aware of the needs of others.

  By the way, there is also an article about Tai Chi: "It Will CALM You Down."

  The Grill: Leo and Inexpensive Fresh Food

  

  One of the best kept culinary secrets of Naples, and there are many such little secrets in Naples, is Leo.

  Leo works the grill in the cafeteria of NCH's North Naples Hospital on Immokalee the way Arthur Rubinstein worked an acoustic piano or Andrés Segovia worked an acoustic guitar.

  If you are visiting someone in the hospital and enter the cafeteria, it will look like most cafeterias. Take a tray by the door, help yourself to napkins and a knife, fork and spoon, check out the foods waiting for you, pass the Nescafé coffee-latte-cappuccino-mocha machine, and way-back in the corner of the wall of refrigerated drinks, you'll see a counter, a display case, a slicing/dicing area, a place for Leo or another worker to stand, and a stove, oven and other food-cooking equipment: a Grill. What makes this grill so special are two things: Leo and inexpensive fresh food.

  Leo, as he will be happy to tell you, is a chef trained in New York City at the Culinary Institute. He has been working the grill at NCH for about eight years so he knows what he is doing and has routines that work for him and make work easier for other employees of Sodexo, the company that has the food concession and some other contracts that provide a healthier and more comfortable NCH experience.

  Brookdale: Holistic Rehab

  After one of my father's hospitalizations at NCH, he was in in-patient rehab at The Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging & Rehabilitation. This is a wonderful place filled with high ideals and great aspirations often bogged down in today's medical routines. For example, their beautiful brochure extols the virtues of aroma therapy in a section on Compassion in Action: "promoting a holistic approach to healing and relaxation utilizing aromatherapy and massage techniques." Sure enough, once an advocate drew their attention to this approach, they found that spraying lavender on a pillow was more effective than increasing the patient's medication.

  This is a true story and is not something negative about NCH. It simply reinforces what everyone in the medical and caregiving community reiterates, loved ones need advocates.

  Informal Conversation

  While in Brookdale, a charge nurse told me about a place she thought was real, though she heard about it on Facebook. It was called something like "Dementia Village," a village where people went about normal lives living with dementia. Of course, her uncertainty piqued my curiosity and Google informed me about "Hogewey" in Weesp, a suburb of Amsterdam. This is "The village where people have dementia – and fun" according to Jon Henley in a lengthy and easy-to-read article in The Guardian (cache).

  Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes us to Hogeway in the video uploaded to YouTube by CNN and embedded below, "CNN's World's Untold Stories: Dementia Village".

  This Bonita Springs NORC is not Dementia Village. We still have to be careful, for example, crossing the parking lot to our handicap spot. Yet, out of the existing community we have found stores, organizations, and people who make it easier for us to live normal lives.

  (Parenthetically, I should note that my father has never really been tested for and diagnosed with dementia but for practical purposes the CNAs in hospitals and SNFs nod to each other and whisper "dementia" because they are more interested in signs and symptoms and what they need to do, rather than a particular medical diagnosis. Also, parenthetically, no one knows if he, or anyone now alive has, the dreaded Alzheimer's - and I would rather find out later than sooner since, as far as I've heard, the only test - so far - can only be conducted post-mortem by examining the brain as part of an autopsy.)

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Video

CNN's World's Untold Stories: Dementia Village

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Segovia Plays Bach

Segovia Plays Albéniz's Sevilla

Rubenstein Plays Albéniz's Sevilla

Here is Rubenstein plays Chopin with London Symphony conducted by André Previn. There is some detailed text accompanying the video. (This window will remain open, just click back here to return to our website.)

Footnote 1: For the Internet General Store I programmed the HTML webpages, found a vendor, got tired of putting product-after-product into a static table, stumbled-upon Cold Fusion, developed applications for database connectivity with either MS Access or an Excel spreadsheet (which I figured would scale-up when necessary), learned that pre-Google search engines were not able to see what was offered in a database so my webpages became more informative and the database was reserved for products, a shopping cart, and cool things like single-logons and customer profiles to remember wish lists and web page color preferences. At the same time, I was developing business relationships with other vendors, shippers, and bankers who could figure out how people could pay me for my products because PayPal was not yet the stable trusted platform it is today.

Obviously, there was no "Amazon Payments", "Amazon Associates" or "Fulfillment by Amazon."

Fortunately, my day job with my parents was more successful. The Federal Government is utilizing the methodology of our Intentional Job Discrimination reports to enable employers to compare each of their establishments with the overall statistics for the employment market composed of employers in the same MSA and industry, and with the same occupations - as suggested by EEOC v. SHELL OIL CO., 466 U.S. 54 (1984).

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