Memory-care facilty to be built, Celina Record

State-of-the-art memory-care facility coming to Prosper Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Jun 17, 2016 As an architect, Charles Hodges has spent his career designing shopping centers, medical offices and entertainment complexes throughout North Texas. The latest project from the founder of Hodges Architecture in North Dallas is decidedly more personal. When it opens next year, Tribute Senior Living, at 190 N. Preston Road in Prosper, will be a sprawling 60,000-square-foot facility dedicated to providing residents state-of-the-art care in an effort to help slow the progression of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The latter claimed the life of Hodges’ father, 89-year-old former Dallas real-estate developer Chester Hodges, in 2001. A groundbreaking ceremony for Tribute Senior Living was held May 23 on what would have been the elder Hodges’ 103rd birthday. “He’d be pleased,” Charles Hodges said recently while fighting back tears as he recalled his father and the disappointing care he received during the last years of his life. “It was just so frustrating watching … the lack of capability in existing facilities at that time, which really were nothing more than a locked wing in a nursing home,” Hodges said. Some staff members at the three facilities where Chester lived seemed “uncertain” about how to tend to patients, he said. Hodges said he believes his father was at times overmedicated by staffers and was frequently isolated socially. On one occasion, he was transported to the psychiatric unit at Parkland Memorial Hospital after displaying aggression while being force fed during one facility’s specified dining hour. His father’s experiences “really had just a profound effect on me in basically seeing that there was such a need to change the attitude toward dementia and how to care for Alzheimer’s patients,” Hodges said. “I just promised my parents that I would do what I could to change this business and to really upgrade and elevate the care level.” Hodges has spent the years since researching the latest medical breakthroughs in memory care, visiting facilities and teaming with neuroscientists, operational partners and other experts to determine which features will be included in Tribute Senior Living’s design – and, more importantly, which will not. For example, he said, mechanical noises such as those caused by rattling air conditioners are “a tremendous generator of agitation in dementia patients.” The same goes for glaring fluorescent lights that can lessen patients’ visual acuity. “I see people that are making elementary mistakes in the choices they make in the design of the facilities … either through ignorance or the decision that patient well-being is not that important over first cost,” he said. Hodges and his investment partners are funding the construction of Tribute Senior Living, which he estimates will cost $10 million to $14 million. “When you walk into our facility, we wanted it to look more like Lifetime Fitness than it does your grandmother’s parlor,” he said. The building’s unique design will encourage residents to wander through its open spaces, an activity that dementia and Alzheimer’s patients find soothing. A Starbucks-like coffee shop will greet visitors at the front door and will overlook the place’s open kitchen area, where the focus will be on providing residents with healthy, brain-boosting foods. Areas where residents can engage with each other, family and staff members will be plentiful. “We want this to be like a great lobby of a hotel where people sit and meet and interact and they are socializing on a full-time basis,” Hodges said. The facility will also feature adjacent medical offices so staffers can escort residents for visits with their primary physicians rather than requiring family members to take time away from work to accompany them on appointments. Tribute Senior Living has been designed with members of the Baby Boom generation in mind, Hodges explained. “These people are fitness oriented; they’re nutritionally aware,” Hodges explained, “so we’ve set up a facility that enables them to get in there and fight the progression of the disease. “We want fighters. That’s what my dad was … and had he had a facility and staff of caregivers” like those planned at Tribute Senior Living, Hodges said, “there’s no telling how we could have slowed the progression of the disease.” “He’s really gone above and beyond to create something that really doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Paula Grammas, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Ryan Institute for Neuroscience and an expert in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. Grammas also serves as Tribute Senior Living’s chief science officer and a research partner. While there are no “magic bullets” available to cure diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s, she said, “There are things that maybe are modifiers of disease progression whether it’s diet or exercise or mental stimulation … different things that are in the scientific literature that really haven’t made their way, I think, to the care piece.” The Tribute model, she said, could eventually “drive the market because people are going to want to put their loved ones in better places. “I think it can be a game-changer.” Follow the Celina Record on Twitter @celinarecord.