RiverWoods, like many nonprofit continuing care communities, differs from ordinary retirement complexes by guaranteeing residents housing and health care for life.
Clinical training occurs in all settings appropriate for a practicing geriatrician including: acute hospital, long-term care, patients' homes, hospice, continuing care communities, and ambulatory care practice.
In many cases, therefore, advisers will be referring callers to assisted living or independent living facilities, nursing homes, specialized dementia residences, continuing care communities or home care agencies that they haven't visited for years, or haven't seen at all.
The Marriott Corporation, which is planning to build for-profit continuing care communities outside Philadelphia, Washington and San Francisco, says it will refund 90percentt of the entry fee to residents or their estates when they move out or die.
"Continuing care communities usually attract people in the second stage of retirement, people aged 74 or 75," said Paul V. Peterson, executive vice president of Covenant Retirement Communities, a Chicago-based church-affiliated organization that runs a dozen communities nationwide.
As at most continuing care communities, Friendship Village offers numerous services as part of its basic package: linen service, housekeeping, utilities, building maintenance, garbage pickup, a shuttle bus to town and parking spots for car owners.
Sharing a continuing care community, he said via email, represents "a new but logical aging services model". Where costs are reasonable, "it may well catch on," he added.
She took advantage of trial-stay programs at three communities before moving in 2006 to a high-rise continuing care community in Portland, Ore., called Holladay Park Plaza, known by residents as the Plaza.
Kendal on Hudson, a nonprofit, Quaker-owned continuing care community, is not scheduled to open until mid-2005, but has already sold 85percentt of its 222 units, according to a marketer, Terry Minervini.
Eva Gatling, an art historian and curator who for many years was the director of the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, N.Y., died on Tuesday at the Westminister-Canterbury, a continuing care community in Virginia Beach, Va., where she had lived in recent years.
Now she is pondering whether it's worth the tax penalty to cash out her retirement accounts for the entry fee to a continuing care community, or whether it's time to accept help from her children.
