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Sex and intimacy in the nursing home: among many issues, resident privacy is key. (Cover Feature).

Article Excerpt
Have you ever considered adding issues of Playboy and Playgirl to your residents' library? How about asking your cable TV provider to offer residents "adult viewing" channels? (A recent newspaper article discusses a nursing home in Denmark that provides pornographic programming on an in-house channel "to ease resident tension.") Have you even thoroughly discussed resident sexuality with staff?

Admittedly, senior sexuality is an uncomfortable subject for many. Our society equates sex with youth, so we don't expect seniors to be sexually active--or even to have sexual desires. But today's seniors--whose procreative drive fueled the baby boom--live in the same sexually saturated culture as the rest of us. And the need to be touched and held, and to feel loved, does not diminish with age.

"We never lose the joy of touch," notes Mark Steege, LMSW-ACP. Steege is certified by the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, and offers training for and consultation services to facilities with populations that are not often viewed as being "sexual." Steege observes humorously that he is especially attuned to seniors' sexual needs because he's 70 years old.

So the first step is to make staff comfortable with talking about seniors' sexuality. Having served as a military chaplain for 20 years, Steege appeals to the religious convictions of his audiences' more conservative members by observing that God made humans as sexual beings.

Humor helps break the ice, too, as does clearing up staff misconceptions. For example, Steege relates a story about a male resident who has an erection while being bathed by a female caregiver. The...

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