Welcome to PSA Thursday, a weekly-ish segment of the Affordable Care Podcast in which we talk about how to handle money, work, and life in the midst of 2020.

For those of you who are new to Affordable Care, and who are new to the PSA Thursday segment, a little quick background. PSA Thursday is totally different from our normal episodes.

These are short, actionable episodes that focus specifically on how to handle some aspect of life that relates to the year 2020.

These are much shorter than our normal episodes. Our interviews don't have key takeaways. We don't answer audience questions. We intentionally keep these ad free, and we keep these hyper-focused on actionable tips.

Today we are going to talk about how you can stay connected with the senior citizens that you love, your grandparents, your grand uncles, and aunts, any person in your life who is elderly or who is a senior.

How can you stay in touch with them in the context of 2020?

With me today is Bria Sullivan, who I will let her introduce herself, but she has spent her career working with seniors. So hello, Bria.

Hi, Paula. I'm so happy to be here.

Bria, you work for a senior care facility. Can you tell me a little bit about the organization that you work for, what services do they offer, and what do you do?

What is your experience working with seniors in that capacity?

Yes, so I work for a company that owns about 300 senior living communities, anywhere from independent living to skilled nursing to memory care and dementia.

A lot of them are together in one community or just separate.

So my role is to provide the training materials for the staff and also for the residents themselves on how to use technology or how to use anywhere from making a phone call or setting up a Zoom call or a Skype call to various levels of things that the staff needs to know and also some of the residents as well.

We kind of shifted during COVID-19 to speak directly to residents more on how they can interact with their family members through tech.

So that was different because we were mostly working with the staff that works with them.

And then on the side, I work with elders in my life. So that includes a maternal and paternal grandmother and also their friends.

My paternal grandmother's neighbor is also 94, both are both about to be 94, but I work with both of them and they have different needs.

So my paternal grandmother has hearing problems. So she has 60% hearing loss.

Really has a hard time hearing my voice specifically, which barely is high pitched, which I didn't think it was.

But she really can't really talk on the phone anymore. She can't have phone calls.

So you can't just call her and pick up the phone and say, hey, how's it going? Can't do that.

The woman upstairs has a hard time seeing and she loves to read. So those are examples of people who have different needs,

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