The Cortland County Coalition for Long-Term Care has done more than just fill care gaps in the community. It caused organizations to work together that hadn’t before.
The Cortland County Coalition for Long-Term Care has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. It started when organizations including the county’s Office For Aging, Department of Social Services and Health Department had conversations on care gaps for aging, said William Lane, a founding member of the coalition.
In 1980, Lane finished a postdoctoral fellowship in Philadelphia, where he studied the problems of placing Medicaid patients in nursing homes. He moved to Cortland and became director of the SUNY Cortland gerontology program, and wanted to get himself and his students involved in local aging services.
”That was one of the major problems that we were facing in Cortland when I arrived,” Lane said. “On any given day, there would be upwards of 30 people in Cortland Memorial Hospital awaiting nursing home placement.”
There weren’t enough long-term care beds, so they would occupy hospital beds, which would force scheduling changes and delay surgeries, he said.
“It was an immense problem,” Lane said. “It was more than just a shortage of nursing home beds, it was really a shortage of long-term care, which is what we call home and community-based services.”
Since the coalition has been established, members brought the New York State Long-Term Home Health Care Program to the county, which allows people who are nursing home-eligible to receive services in their own home, Lane said.
Caitlin Portzline, president of the coalition, has worked as an aide and social worker, and runs the Portzline Day Program on North West Street in Homer – where people with Alzheimer’s and dementia can go during the day for activities and the occasional therapy pet visit.
While working at a Cortland nursing home, she would discharge people as soon as possible, she said.
“I set up their services as quickly as I could to make sure they have all of the support in the community,” Portzline said. “That they could go home and be independent, and not be in a facility. That’s a huge passion of mine; if they have independence and they’re capable, then why are they here?”
There was also no adult daycare, no hospice services and very limited adult home services before the coalition, Lane said.
“We really just did not have the adequate services, and that’s what really drove the providers to try and come together and try and find solutions,” Lane said. “One of the things we did first was push the state to allow us to have hospice services here. They told us initially that we could be served by Binghamton, Syracuse or Ithaca, and we said that wasn’t good enough. We needed it here.”
Over time, the coalition got adult day services, hospice, assisted the hospital in creating a third nursing home, and got one phone number that people could call to get into the long-term care system, or provide information on disability services, Lane said.
“What the coalition would do is if there was a program we felt we could bring into the community, we would work together as a group to find a sponsor,” Lane said. “For example, the Long-Term Home Health Care Program; we found a hospital willing to do it, then all of the agencies in the community supported it, wrote letters and lobbied the state.”
This happened so often that Cortland County became known state-wide as a community that would support new programs. As a result, it would be one of the first counties offered new programs, Lane said.
Challenges remain. The two biggest issues now are housing and transportation, Portzline said. Services where people can be paid to care for their own loved one have left the area, and long-term care isn’t affordable for most without insurance.
“If they don’t have insurance that covers aid services that are even available, with the lack of aids in this community, private care aid services are $20 an hour and up,” she said.
One option is long-term care insurance, but it is expensive, and needs to be taken out early, Lane said.
“You need to think about it a lot before most people think about it,” Lane said. “People need to make plans. Most of us don’t do a lot of planning. It’s hard to do. We don’t really like to think about those issues, but we all need to do it.”
