For more than a year, Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS) has been screening older clients for possible dementia or mild cognitive impairment. In February, researchers began looking at what happens when a person gets out of mass shelter and into a private space.
Heather Ross, Assistant Professor at ASU’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss how the research has progressed.
CASS is a 600-bed shelter, the largest in Maricopa County. CASS partnered with Circle the City to create a memory clinic, screening unhoused seniors for signs of dementia and mild cognitive impairment. Most patients screen positive for one of these conditions.
According to Ross, the Phoenix Police and Fire departments had a problem and reached out for help. They were seeing many older adults on the streets, or were close to it, who they were sure had dementia.
“We worked with CASS, and they started screening every adult aged 55 and over who come into shelter, start screening them for dementia and cognitive decline,” Ross said. “They found that a lot of them have dementia or cognitive decline.”
Of the adults CASS screened, 90% of them were found to have dementia or cognitive decline.
In these cases, cognitive decline typically leads to older adults becoming unhoused. It starts with forgetting to pay a bill, and it ends with these adults not having a home.
According to Ross, there is a step in between of being in a large congregate shelter to getting into your own home. This step is a non-congregate shelter, where people can have their own space without fully living alone in an apartment.
“What we found in a very small study of one of those early attempts at non-congregate sheltering was that not everybody’s dementia screening score got better,” Ross said. “Some people actually got worse when they were not in that congregate space.”
Ross is continuing to work with CASS to screen older adults in non-congregate shelters to find solutions and understand how to best serve this community.
