Grantee Highlight: Abramson Senior Care

Jewish Tradition of Patient and Caregiver-centered Services

The Madelyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life and Subsidiaries (Abramson Senior Care) has provided care for Philadelphia’s Jewish elders and their families for more than 150 years. As part of their continuum of care, they provide a wide range of services from their day care center to in-home care that includes nurse practitioner house calls, physical rehabilitation, memory care and hospice care. The two grants Abramson Senior Care received from Sephardic Foundation on Aging (SFOA) — totaling $117,500 — helped develop and run an innovative and fully virtual family caregiver education program to fulfill a yet unmet need.

Providing Remote Senior Care Instruction to Families in Need

Throughout their spectrum of care, Abramson Senior Care provides services to about 5,800 seniors per year. Although the pandemic shuttered their senior day care program, the $37,500 grant they received from SFOA in 2021 allowed them to launch their Family Caregiver Dementia Training and Education program to help those families with at-home seniors. The program was fully virtual, both in light of the pandemic and also because many seniors prefer receiving care in their homes, and aimed to equip families with similar training offered to frontline staff.

Participants received training via four sessions that covered topics such as: understanding Alzheimer’s and dementia, effective communication, and ensuring a safe home environment. The ability to run a fully virtual program was not only effective in providing a service to families with seniors in need, but also helped widen the organization’s impact area. Indeed, the participants in the pilot were not just local, they also included some from New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and even Tennessee.

Integrating Families into the Continuum of Care

In 2022, SFOA provided $80,000 for the continuation of Abramson Senior Care’s family caregiver education program. The second donation not only validated the organization’s work, but also their recognition of an unmet need for this type of training. After the first grant catalyzed the start of the program, the second one helped the staff prioritize the research and development needed to optimize it.

Though the senior care center had financial needs for more technology and training resources, SFOA’s contribution was able to fill that funding gap. It also helped the organization build from the learned lessons of their pilot program in order to more effectively serve seniors and reach more caregivers.

SFOA’s Grants Helped us “Exceed Our Project Deliverables”

In their development of a high quality training product for their family care education program, Abramson Senior Care prioritized a service they could replicate and expand beyond the pilot. For Karen Eshraghi, Director of Grants and Research, the SFOA contributions helped them “exceed their project deliverables.” The organization had initially targeted 10-15 caregivers for the pilot program and ultimately managed to train 17 participants. The grants also helped them implement an evidence-based approach to regularly survey caregivers and make sure their needs were met. Abramson Senior Care now hopes to offer their training on a quarterly basis and continue their community outreach with on-site implementations of their program.