Some of the stories in the latest edition’s Health Section cover topics like:  

• assisted living best practices
• elder abuse conference
• ethics guidelines in research
• smartphone apps to help caregivers and seniors
• long-distance care giving

This is just a sample from one section of this great daily resource. You can subscribe to the GANS Ageing News Daily – look for the SUBSCRIBE button on the top right side of the page.

Subscribe for daily delivery of the latest in ageing news!

Simply click the ‘subscribe’ button (on the right of the screen) when you are visiting the paper to have it delivered to your inbox daily. Click here to visit the latest edition.

The paper is updated every day with new stories, links and more!

The video is in four parts, due to its length, and can be viewed at the following links:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

For more information about the PATH Clinic, you can contact peggyhobbs@cdha.nshealth.ca

Thanks to the Geriatric Medicine Research Unit for hosting these videos on their YouTube channel! There are other videos there on topics such as driving and dementia, frailty, and more.

The guide is a comprehensive publication of everything from useful phone numbers to seniors-serving organizations and events  in Nova Scotia. You can get your copy here.

Topic:Emergency Preparedness: do older adults help or need help in emergencies?
Speaker: John Webb, the Provincial Director of Emergency Social Services.
Time:12:00-1:00pm
Date: Friday January 22, 2010
Place: Royal Bank Theatre, 1st floor, Halifax Infirmary, Summer St, Halifax.

A light lunch will be provided courtesy of the Department of Seniors.

For those of you who cannot attend this session, we will be capturing it on video and hosting it here at CAKEns.com. When it has been uploaded to the site, we will email our members to let you know.
For those who do plan to attend,  feel free to bring a friend!

We are planning a continuing series of Lunch and Learns through May of  this year, and will be posting the times, dates and topics for this in the very near future.

From the Department of Seniors website:

“The Senior Safety Grant will contribute to: the enhancement and/or expansion of existing Seniors’ Safety Program’s services; the expansion of Seniors’ Safety Programs to areas not currently served and; professional development for program coordinators. The Senior Safety Grant will provide annual funding up to $20,000 to Seniors’ Safety Programs. The Grant will:

• demonstrate government’s commitment to seniors’ safety;
• strengthen links to government’s senior abuse prevention and crime prevention strategies;
• provide a cost effective approach to crime prevention and community capacity building;
• provide professional development opportunities for Senior Safety Coordinators;
• expand programs into communities where they do not exist and;
• ensure that more Nova Scotians have access to these programs and services.

The overall goal of the Seniors’ Safety Program is to address the safety concerns of seniors by promoting education and awareness about crime prevention, senior abuse and safety and health issues, and by enhancing communication between seniors and police.”

The grants are for a maximum of $20,000 per individual project. Visit the Department of Seniors here, get the details of the grant here or call them toll free at  1-800-670-0065.

You can also view the Department of Justice website here.

The workshops are free and there are three different locations in HRM.

Saturday, November 28 Caregivers Nova Scotia office
9:00 am – 12:00 pm Halifax Shopping Centre
Tower I, Suite 105

Tuesday, December 1 Morrison Room, LeBrun Centre
6:00 pm – 9:00 pm 36 Holland Avenue, Bedford

Friday, December 11 Sobeys Community Room
2:00 pm – 5:00 pm 535 Portland Street, Dartmouth

To learn more about these workshops, contact Brenda at Caregivers Nova Scotia at 421-7390 or projects@caregiversns.org

A report from the Tufts University Program in Evidence-Based Complimentary and Alternative Medicine reports that “studies suggest that Tai Chi is a safe exercise, even for frail elders, and may be beneficial to various aspects of cardiovascular health. It requires no specialized equipment, is relatively inexpensive and can be taught/learned in a group setting. Tai Chi appears to elicit a cardiovascular response equivalent to that associated with moderate intensity exercise, and as such meets the American College of Sports Medicine, American Heart Association, and Centers for Disease Control recommendations for daily performance of low- to moderate-intensity activities.”

And in the November issue of Arthritis Care & Research, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology, researchers reported “that patients over 65 years of age with knee osteoarthritis (OA) who engage in regular Tai Chi exercise improve physical function and experience less pain. Tai Chi (Chuan) is a traditional style of Chinese martial arts that features slow, rhythmic movements to induce mental relaxation and enhance balance, strength, flexibility, and self-efficacy.”

If you would like to learn more about Tai Chi, or even give it a try, you can check out the website of the International Taoist Tai Chi Society – Atlantic Region. Here you will find information on classes all over Nova Scotia.

One such tool  is called Newsmap, which was designed by Marcos Weskamp. It creates a visualization of information from  the Google News news aggregator.  Google’s  aggregator collects news from around the world. Newsmap takes the aggregated news stories and turns them into this:

Wow. I know what you are thinking: “Too much!” And it may be. But let me walk you through this and then show you how we can customize it to collect just the information we want.

The different colours correspond to the different news categories listed across the bottom right.  Hover your mouse over any of the stories (on the website of course, not here) and a snippet from the story will pop up. Click your mouse on the story and it will open up in another window, at the website from which the story came.  The creator explains the size of the cells:

“Google News automatically groups news stories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.”

The above image is all the news from Canada in all news categories.

Now let’s make this  find just news from Canada about seniors, in the category of ‘health.  We keep ‘Canada’ selected at the top, type in ‘seniors’ in the search bar on the top right, and de-select all the categories at the bottom except for health. ‘ What we get looks like this:

This is a very handy tool for a group like us who run a blog that needs fresh content updated every day or two, but it’s also fun for anyone who would like to try it.  We can customize the search to look for a variety of topicssee quickly what topics are hottest in the news right now.

To try this yourself, head over to Newsmap and give it a whirl. Remember, you can’t break it, so just enter something in the search bar and see what happens.  Happy hunting!

“The subjects were divided into two groups to either receive three months of vigorous physical activity (one hour, three times per week) or to get no aerobic exercise at all. Subjects were classified as sedentary at the beginning of the study but gradually increased their fitness levels until they were working at 70 per cent of their maximum heart rate, using treadmills and cycling machines. They were supervised by a certified exercise trainer.”

While some may worry about the high level of activity engaged in by the participants, Dr Madden says “There seems to be a knee-jerk reluctance to getting these older adults to exercise yet we used a vigorous level of activity and didn’t have any trouble keeping participants in our study. They enjoyed the activity. People always underestimate what older adults can do.”

He also notes, however, that many people need a kick start to motivate them into a regular fitness program.  In aid of this, you can visit the Nova Scotia Department of Health Promotion and Protection’s Senior section here, and find your local YMCA here. You can visit the Canadian Cardiovascular Society’s website here.