How Art And ‘Creative Aging’ Can Help Seniors Deal With Illnesses Like Dementia
SAINT JOHN– The former CEO of Propel is hoping to show the healing, and perhaps money-saving power of art with her new venture.
Anita Punamiya is the founder of Art4Life Inc., a for-profit social enterprise that wants to provide art classes to help seniors improve their overall health and quality of life, and has been found by research to help prevent and slow down the progression of illnesses like dementia. This is a concept known as “Creative Aging.”
Creative Aging is broadly defined as exploring one’s creative potential in the later years of life. It’s a movement which recognizes the beneficial role of the arts in improving the quality of life for older adults and its contribution to their psychological, physical and emotional well-being.
“Much of today’s political dialogue on health-care reform centres on how to deal with ‘aging’ and how to pay for the cost of health care in the future,” says Punamiya. “Using the concept of ‘Creative Aging’ Art4Life offers the other half of the equation: how to innovatively use existing resources to improve the quality of life of seniors and simultaneously reduce costs to the system. We don’t simply ask how we can afford health care. We show how to make it affordable.”
Punamiya got the idea for Art4Life after watching her mother struggle with dementia.
My mother was a physician. She lived in India and she retired very late, in her 70s. I noticed that towards the end of her life she developed dementia. All of us in the family struggled to understand her experiences and how to deal with it and how to help her,” says Punamiya.
“She has been the biggest inspiration of my life and trying to watch her struggle was really painful because she was very charismatic and very inspiring all my life. To see her struggle was hard.”
To help herself better understand what her mother was going through, Punamiya started doing some research, which is where she learned about creative aging. She found lots of resources through a California-based organization call Aging 2.0, which also works with entrepreneurs around the world working in the aging space. She attended conferences, as well as read research papers around creative aging.
For instance, this study done in the United States found that participating seniors visited the doctor less, used fewer prescription drugs and scored better on scales of morale and loneliness.
“I was astounded by the results that I found,” says Punamiya. “I was like, ‘oh my God, why don’t we all know about this? Why aren’t we doing this?’ “
At the time, Punamiya was still the CEO of Propel, but she knew this was something she wanted to pursue.
“I didn’t know yet what in the aging space I wanted to do, but told the board that I was going to step down at the end of the spring cohort of 2017,” she says. “I was going to take my time to think about what exactly I wanted to do.”
As a practising artist in painting and sculpture herself, Punamiya soon realized working in the creative aging space was a perfect fit. After attending conferences, learning about other businesses, and taking training courses on teaching art for seniors, she came up with the concept for Art4Life.
Art4Life will hire different local artists from different mediums to teach classes. All the artists will be trained by Punamiya to work with seniors. Punamiya says she already has a team of artists set to be trained. The company will provide engaging, cohesive classes that will give senior long-term benefits, something most communities and long-term care homes aren’t currently able to offer.
“It’s about actually doing something. It’s not about colouring between the lines” she says. “Some of them have programs where they’ve had volunteer artists come in and do things, but it doesn’t last because volunteer activities can only go so far,” she says. “It needs to be done on a long-term basis. If you have paid artists coming in, then there’s accountability, there’s responsibility, there are whole different criteria you can hold things for.”
The obvious business model for Art4Life would be to charge for the classes (fee-for-service model). However, based on some feedback from some potential customers and stakeholders, Punamiya concluded it may not make it accessible for all seniors. Some would be able to pay, others may need subsidization, and some others not have the capacity to pay for it at all.
So, Punamiya approached the provincial government to see if they were aware of the benefits of Creative Aging and if there was some interest in bringing it to New Brunswick and to explore options they could work on together. Though there is lots of research available about the success of creative aging in other countries and some parts of Canada, Punamiya says the province was interested but wanted to some research done locally as a pilot.
“They wanted a research project here,” she says. “So I said ‘okay, we’ll do research here.’ “
The province of New Brunswick has received $75-million from the federal government for its Healthy Seniors Pilot Project. Part of that funding will be used to allow businesses to partner with academic researchers to demonstrate what works and what doesn’t. The first call for proposals for this funding went out at the end of August and Art4Life has applied.
Art4Life has proposed a two-year project that will focus on seniors still living at home in the Greater Saint John area. The idea is that by demonstrating that Creative Aging activities are effective, the government would consider covering/subsidizing Art4Life programming as a form of preventative and health-enhancing care for seniors.
This is a completely different way of thinking. Research in other areas has shown that by participating in regular creative activities conducted by professionally-trained artists, seniors have better health outcomes and take fewer prescription drugs, have fewer visits to the doctor and ER. This, in turn, leads to huge cost savings to the healthcare system,” says Punamiya.
“By utilizing local artists, assets we have in our region, we can redistribute our resources. We have a large senior population, few nursing home beds, increasing healthcare budgets. We need to consider other ways to deal with this. Art4Life is looking outside of what we’re doing now and saying, ‘there is another way, are we willing to look at it?’ “
Given funding approval, the goal is to start the studies in early 2019.
The additional research wasn’t something Punamiya planned to do in the beginning, since there was already a lot out there. But if that’s what she needs to do to have decision makers take the value of Creative Aging seriously, she’ll do it.
“I just want to show people that it works, because people don’t take art that seriously. Even when I started on this journey, I thought people were more, ‘oh, she’s upset because her mother passed away.’ Yes, I was upset,” she says.
“But I want to show people the potential this has because it’s working in other countries, why can’t we make it work for us?”