BERGENFIELD, N.J. — At Sunshine Adult Day Center, every morning starts with a parade around the room.
Today, the theme is multicultural, and the flag bearers have no shortage of countries: Philippines, India, Haiti, Mexico, United States. Most of them older adults, attendees dance through the room, waving streamers and banging drums as Pitbull’s “I Know You Want Me” blasts.
Proudly representing her home country of Nigeria, Charity Wogwugwu, 87, is dressed to the nines in a pistachio green skirt embroidered with red and gold flowers, a lemon yellow floral top with puffed sleeves and a pleated gold headwrap.
“They pay attention to us. They recognize us,” said Wogwugwu, who lives in neighboring Teaneck with her daughter and six grandkids. “I love coming to Sunshine.”
Everyone at the center has a health need, be it mobility issues, dementia or difficulty completing daily tasks on their own. Sunshine staff say they have one goal: keep people mentally and physically sharp enough that they can stay out of places like nursing homes for as long as possible.
Adult day centers are the most racially diverse long-term care setting in the U.S., with many tailoring their offerings to the foods, traditions and cultures of their clientele and serving as key resource hubs to older people of color and immigrants. Day centers also serve the least amount of people of all long-term care settings, in part because of the cost and limited insurance coverage options; federal Medicare, the largest insurer of older adults, doesn’t cover them.
Sixty percent of people who use adult day centers identify as people of color, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Centers like Sunshine are microcosms of their communities, attracting people from families who are especially reluctant to put their elders in residential long-term care due to cultural norms or their experiences with racism.
Overall, they’re “underrecognized” for the role they play in communities of color, said Tina Sadarangani, an adult and geriatric nurse practitioner who researches the aging of older immigrants at New York University.
“The biggest problem that adult day services contends with is public perception,” she said of the centers, which are sometimes seen as an equivalent to child “day cares.”
On the other side of the country, He Fengling wakes up at 5:30 a.m. on days she goes to Hong Fook Adult Day Health Care Center near Oakland, California’s Chinatown…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at ABC News: Health…