By Geralyn Magan
The LTSS Center is working with the Cambridge Housing Authority to assess the needs and interests of residents in 4 housing communities.
The LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston is assessing the need for services and supports among residents living in 4 housing communities managed by the Cambridge Housing Authority (CHA) in Cambridge, MA. The project is funded by Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, with a matching grant from CHA.
CHA has long recognized the importance of bringing services to its senior and multifamily housing communities, according to Senior Planner Clara Fraden. The need for a resident assessment surfaced during the past 2 years as the housing authority began focusing more attention on “the intersection between health care and housing,” she says.
“We need data to help guide us to see the needs at each site, to identify potential partners for future programs, and to convince those partners that this is a worthy investment,” says Fraden. “I think we have a very good anecdotal sense of the needs because our whole staff is very engaged with our residents. But we need data to either confirm our anecdotal evidence or to show us things that are in conflict with our anecdotal evidence.”
CHA offers services in all 4 of the senior housing communities where the resident assessment will take place. Those services are coordinated by 2 social workers who are each responsible for working with residents in 2 building.
“This ends up meaning that we have one social worker for about 400 households,” says Fraden. “So, the services are there but, of course, it’s not enough.”
The assessment comes in the middle of CHA’s multiyear effort to modernize its entire portfolio of buildings, some of which date back to the 1930s. The housing authority manages about 2,900 apartments at over 30 sites. In addition to adding new housing units to some of those sites, the renovation process in some buildings also entails adding areas of common space from which new partners could provide health-related services to residents.
USING SURVEY ANSWERS TO TAILOR PROGRAMMING
The LTSS Center will distribute a self-administered survey to all residents of the 4 senior housing communities where the assessment is taking place. That survey will ask residents a variety of question about their physical and mental health, functional abilities, level of physical activity, support networks, and transportation use, among other things.
In addition to flagging particular service needs, the assessment questions are designed to help CHA tailor any future services to the unique makeup of individual housing settings. For example, questions about where residents in certain buildings receive their health care services will help CHA identify local health care providers that would make the best partners in initiatives that bring services to those buildings.
The assessment will also collect basic demographic data, like age, gender, race, and ethnicity. This information will allow researchers to look more closely at different populations within a building, and to study how needs may differ across gender, race, and ethnic groups. That kind of analysis is important for planning, says Alisha Sanders, the LTSS Center’s director of housing and services policy research.
“When the housing authority is designing its programming or thinking about its partnerships and collaborations, it can think about some of these sub-populations, what they specifically might need, or whether services might be more appealing if they were offered in a certain way or if certain partners were involved,” she says.
A REPRESENTATIVE ASSESSMENT
Researchers will provide in-person assistance to any residents who need help completing the assessment. They also will work with CHA to identify and follow up with residents who may not complete the survey on their own.
“We want to make sure we are getting all the different perspectives in the building, not just the people who come out and participate in everything all the time,” says Sanders. “Our goal is to get a true representation of the needs and the interests in the building.”
NEW KNOWLEDGE FOR THE LTSS CENTER
In addition to helping CHA gauge the need for programming among its residents, Sanders expects survey findings to add to the LTSS Center’s housing-plus-services knowledge base.
“There is always something valuable to learn from these kinds of assessments,” she says. “They can help us learn more about older housing residents, to see differences across different kinds of housing communities, or to confirm consistency across those communities.”
“This assessment will be particularly interesting to us because we are partnering with a housing authority,” Sanders continues. “We are looking forward to taking a focused look at housing authority residents and to see if there are any differences between those settings and other senior housing communities.”