Caring for Caregivers: a video podcast conversation with George Dicks

Washington's "Caring for Caregivers" video podcast series features discussions with local experts, community leaders, and caregivers just like you on a range of topics to help you along your caregiving journey.

This month, AARP State Director Marguerite Ro sits down with George Dicks, a geriatric mental health practitioner with Harborview Mental Health and Addiction Service, to talk about what it takes to ensure healthy aging. In addition to his professional experience, George’s lived experience as a kinship provider, caregiver, and a community advocate informs his vision of healthy aging.

Read more about the interview below, and be sure to check our page each month for a new episode. Please also take a moment to view additional podcast episodes here. Enjoy!

From Marguerite Ro, AARP Washington State Director

What does it take to ensure healthy aging?  This is the question that we are using to kick-off our Caring for Caregivers conversations.  What comes to mind for me is ensuring that we have a health promoting environment that includes the resources, services, and supports needed within the communities that we live in to age well and age in place.  At the personal level, I think of what it will take to ensure that each of us experiences the best emotional, mental, physical, and oral health possible, while also accepting that our bodies age over time.

Since I joined AARP Washington in September 2022, I have had the pleasure of meeting older adults across the state who are actively working to promote healthy aging.  (This is especially true of our volunteers.)  What each of these individuals has is a sense of optimism, passion for community, and a dedication to making the world a better place for their loved ones and for generations to come.

George Dicks who I am speaking with on our inaugural Caring for Caregivers conversations is one of these amazing individuals.  George and I met over a decade ago as members of the University of Washington’s Health Promotion Research Center Community Advisory Board which is dedicated to developing and disseminating evidence-based interventions that support healthy aging.  George is also one of the few geriatric mental health providers at Harborview Medical Center.  In addition to his professional experience, George’s lived experience as a kinship provider, caregiver, and a community advocate informs his vision of healthy aging. 

Healthy aging, as George points out, means that we actively must attend to our emotional and mental well-being, as well as our physical ailments and he notes that we shouldn’t have to tackle the issues of aging alone. Quite frankly, we can create an environment that is more attune and responsive to the needs of our aging population.  Together, in past conversations, he and I have reflected on the lessons learned or the takeaways from the pandemic:  the importance and value of social connection, the need to have dedicated and tailored services for older adults, the need to strengthen and improve the conditions at long-term care facilities (for both the residents and the staff), the ability to find and connect to needed resources, and the role of community and family members in caring for loved ones.

What strikes me is that at the core of healthy aging and the issues above are caring and caregiving.  Will we as Washingtonians and in our respective communities, honor, care, and put into place the systems and supports that are needed to ensure healthy aging?  And can we create an environment that also supports the more than 820,000 unpaid family caregivers that are caring for their loved ones?  The demand for caregivers is only going to grow.  By 2050, 23% percent of Washingtonians will be 65 or older and over 85 and older population will have quadrupled in size to a population of over 550,000.

Healthy aging and caregiving are inextricably linked.  This is why caregiving has become a major focus of our work at AARP Washington.  Each of us deserves to age healthily and age well.  And across each of our lifetimes, we are likely to experience opportunities to give care and receive care.   I hope you will join us in as we seek to create the environment where healthy aging is the norm and that caregiving (and caregivers) are supported in the ways that they should be.

- Marguerite Ro, AARP Washington State Director