There is a growing impact that isolation has on seniors and social connection makes all the difference! Dave Blanchard, Strategic Business Development at Hamilton CapTel discusses on this week’s episode of Bridge the Gap.

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Listen to Dave on Ep. 258.

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Welcome to season six of Bridge The Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. Powered by sponsors Accushield, Aline, Hamilton CapTel, Service Master, Patriot Angels, The Bridge Group Construction and Solinity. And produced by Solinity Marketing.

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Lucas 00:50

Welcome to Bridge The Gap podcast, the Senior Living podcast with Josh and Lucas. A very great show today centered around resident engagement. We want to welcome a great friend and a great supporter sponsor to the Bridge The Gap program. We want to welcome Dave Blanchard, he's over strategic business development at Hamilton CapTel, welcome back to the program.

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Dave 1:13

Really great to see you guys again. Loved working with you last time. So we're super excited to talk again about some more things that we're really passionate about.

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Lucas 1:21

I'm very excited about this topic. When your original podcast came out around resident engagement and isolation, it really did resonate with our audience and the industry and really for obvious reasons. This is something that the industry really strives to alleviate and if there's a value proposition for congregate care, i.e. senior housing or senior living, it's engagement, it's relationships, it's being able to thrive and be engaged as opposed to what so often is the case is you have a widow that may be living alone. That's not really a case study for thriving. So before we dive into that specifically, I would love to hear some of the evolution of Hamilton CapTel as it's been around for a very long time. How did y'all step into senior care and specifically centered around hearing loss?

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Dave 2:21

I just was in Nebraska, that's where our corporate office is. So if you've ever driven across I80, right about in the middle, you know Nebraska's a huge rectangle and right in the middle is Aurora, Nebraska. I work for Hamilton Telecommunications, which has been in Aurora, Nebraska since 1901. In the sixties, the Nelson family picked up this phone co-op, rural phone model, that started to support Hamilton County, Nebraska. That's where the name's from by the way. We've been a phone provider there since 1901. When telephone relay services became part of the Americans with Disabilities Act, they asked us as a great provider to jump in. And an interesting story, it was like Sprint, AT&T, MCI and Hamilton, one of which you probably never heard of. We've been doing that ever since. And as the evolution of telephone relay connectivity, bringing people together, primarily individuals with hearing loss, the technology has evolved from TTY units that you had to call one number and the information was forwarded on to now you can make just like a regular phone call with a caption telephone that's got all kinds of things. But we're really not about commercials for our phones. It's more like we love the business of connecting people and have done so for 122 years.

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Lucas 3:44

Seniors face a litany of different challenges as we all are aging, right? What makes hearing loss in particular so isolating?

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Dave 3:57

Personal story. My son graduated from high school a couple weeks ago. We had a party with about 50 people. My wife's dad wears hearing aids. Bunch of people in the house and of course we're the loud family. Everybody yaking away talking, getting caught up and things like that. But my father-in-law chose to set the dining table out in the patio and didn't really want to come in the house. And it's because his hearing aid works in such a way that it's very difficult in a loud boomy setting. He couldn't engage with the conversations as they're going on in the house. He preferred to stay outside. And so people of course, because he is the patriarch, we had to go out and visit the patriarch and hang out and talk to Wayne outside. So that's a good example of what happens when you've got hearing loss is it becomes more and more difficult in a large setting, in a boomy setting where the noise volume goes up and down. Folks really have great difficulties staying connected because they just can't hear what's going on.

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Lucas 4:56

How has y'all's products and services evolved in the marketplace and how does it specifically address that challenge of hearing loss?

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Dave 5:05

I've actually been there for the installation day where we actually go to a senior living community. Somebody hasn't talked to their kids on the phone in about 10 years because hearing loss just doesn't allow that receiver to work. When you can read along with those captions and actually not worry about having to focus so hard on trying to hear, you can really rather just read the captions and respond if you still have the gift of voice. That is a life-changing moment. And I've been fortunate to do some installs where people are nearly in tears because they're finally able to connect on the phone without doing the "What?! I can't hear you! Can you yell it?" It's really an awesome moment.

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Lucas 5:48

What a great way to share our passions together around the senior living industry. We talk about this a lot where it's just so important that we have people that are specifically focused on the nuances of aging and living in a senior living community. How has that impacted you personally in your personal life and also in your career?

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Dave 6:11

I'm not from the hearing industry, right? I had to become a subject expert in it. Like I have to hang out with audiologists and talk about things like audiograms or hearing notches. I have to study things like the surgeon general's analysis of why isolation is now at epidemic levels. I've had to become far more of a phone guy than I really expected. And the interesting part of it is, I'm in my sixties, my parents are in their nineties and we have lots of friends with lots of parents that are seeking advice like how do I hang on to independence? How do I hang onto my family members? And it's less to do with our phone, it's more to do with the tools that are out there and available, like building a different porch on the back of a house that can have the same level of floor as the inside of the house so that if you're using a walker you can stay safe. Being able to absorb all that information was a totally unexpected thing for me. But it is part of the job and I think it really represents the broad spectrum of things that work in the industry, the things that you've got to be aware of. And that's really my role is to talk about these things. What is the surgeon general saying? What are the differences we can make today? Not just with hearing loss but with safety and care and all the things that come with engagement.

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Lucas 7:36

You mentioned the surgeon general report in the middle of the year in 2023. Isolation is not just an older adult topic or issue. Isolation is now a global topic and issue and unfortunately we've got years of case studies to go back and review. Can you unpack that for us?

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Dave 7:57

It's not often you can sit down and read a white paper that's 85 pages long and be absolutely jacked about the content. The Surgeon General starts off in the front end of his analysis. Like when he first became Surgeon General in 2014, he didn't really think isolation was a public health concern, but then he did this tour around America, a listening tour. The light bulb came on and it says social disconnection was far more common than he had realized. And it confirmed that it was the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's worse than drinking six beers a day. It's worse. In conversations with Jack York not long ago we were talking about it. It's like we've been yelling about isolation, let's avoid isolation, let's engage. We've been talking about this for a decade and we're finally at a spot where the lead guy for wellness and health for America is finally saying the same things that we're saying.

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Dave 8:55

There's some amazing statistics, mindful reconnection. That's one of the things that we're working on as far as a campaign to talk to people about it. Like, can you be mindful about making sure you stick with those friends? If you're a band geek, stick with the band friends. If you're a fisherman, go fishing with friends. Don't go hop in the boat by yourself. There's all kinds of things we can unpack out of there. The three vital components of social connection. He talked about structure, function, and quality. The number of relationships, not just the people that live next to you, but making sure you're drawn your kids in, family members in, friends, even though you may not be in the best shape, the function, the degree at which you can talk about things, the history that you have and then the quality on your worst day.

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Dave 9:40

You got somebody who can come and hang with you. These are the things you gotta figure out. And the Surgeon General just did a fantastic summary, but really talking about the declines, like clearly identifying the declines that have happened over time. Like I see my teenagers sometimes staring at his phone, like he's engaged with his phone, but he is disengaged with me. Unfortunately, they've actually gotten to the point where they can key in on the statistics. Social isolation has increased for the average senior 24 hours a month compared to 2003. And again, this is pre-pandemic to today. The pandemic certainly didn't do us any favors in the industry. This report really does a good job of clearly identifying how pervasive it actually is.

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Lucas 10:28

So given that study, how have you and also your team there at Hamilton CapTel taken that information? Are there any new ideas or some takeaways from that that is helping you actually bring some of these things to light and provide solutions?

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Dave 10:44

One of the first things we did is, in my position, again, I get to talk to people like I am today. The day I said, "Hey, Alexa's super cool, but if you can't hear, she's kind of a drag." The room was kinda like, "Ooh," you know, because Alexa's like this super tool in the world of senior living. And so one of the things that we're doing right now is we're sponsoring tailgate with Jack York and we're having parties. We were in Nebraska last week and to see the joy, to see the connection, to see the engagement, playing games, seeing the person that just raised the rates, Amy from the Heritage Group in Nebraska said, “I just raised your rates. I'm going in the dunk tank. Who wants to throw the first ball?,” pulling people in and having this joyful interaction was just fantastic. Music, food, ice cream, have a party. These are the things we're sponsoring because we're not concerned about having to place another phone. We're concerned about having an excuse to engage people, which may bring about the need for a phone or maybe bring about the hearing aids. I joked at ICAA not long ago about the fact that there are so many hearing aids in the drawer. If I could collect all those up, we could probably outfit half of the United States. The number of individuals at hearing loss has gone from just several years ago, 45 million. It's expected by 2025 to be 70 million. And so that's a lot of people with hearing loss and we always hear the jokes like, "What?" Taking it seriously because hearing loss is kind of the forgotten chronic condition. And when I talked to Josh, we talked about the stack ranking of chronic conditions and how that's changing over time and these are the factors that affect Medicare and what's covered and what's not. And hearing loss has moved up in the top 100 chronic conditions across America, across the globe actually. Hearing loss has become much more prominently placed in the standards of care that are actually dictating what benefits are covered. And so it's just more of a part of life when you know someone has hearing loss to keep them engaged. It's just a critical piece of the puzzle and making sure that it got some tools available is just a really good thing.

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Lucas 13:03

Yeah, I totally agree. That's fascinating information. So as we round out our conversation, our industry is full of activity professionals where their number one goal is to keep engagement and what an incredible position that is. I'm sure in your travels and in your career in working in and around this, you've met some great people. Any final words to the activity professionals and marketing and sales directors that one of their primary functions is to keep engagement and are interacting with our older adults every day?

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Dave 13:38

It's impressive to see. My mom, 94, kicking and screaming and said ,"I'm not going to a community. I'm not going into congregate care. I don't think I want to do that. I get plenty of social interaction." She has attended horse branding or she has done bingo or they went to see the Christmas lights in the van and all of those creative approaches from games to just being out in the courtyard to structured activities that keep the cognitive skills. I'm overwhelmed with how happy we are that my mom is immersed in an environment where they care so much. As much as we do at Hamilton about what we do, maintaining that flow of constant activity and constant opportunities for joy and interaction. That's what makes all the difference in the world.

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Lucas 14:36

What a great way to end our conversation today and that really resonates with me personally. And I know here on the Bridge The Gap Network, our listeners are going to want to stay connected with you. And I just want to say to anybody that's listening right now, Bridge The Gap has been committed for years in bringing these great stories and educational content to you. And without companies like Hamilton CapTel, this would not be possible. And so we are very, very grateful for our supporters and our partners. Please, we ask that you look into Dave, contact them and their companies. If this is of interest to you, we will make sure that we put all of this in the show notes and also on our website, btgvoice.com where you can access this content and so much more. I know Dave is on LinkedIn, as we are, and we'd love to continue the conversation with you there. Please like, and comment and share and help us to hear your story and how this is impacting you. Dave, thank you so much for your time today.

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Dave 15:39

It's absolutely my pleasure. So anytime. Nice to see you.

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Lucas 15:42

And thanks to all of our listeners for listening to another great episode of Bridge The Gap.

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Speaker 15:47

Thanks for listening to Bridge the Gap podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at btgvoice.com.