New Bedford, Mass. – Coastline Elderly Services, Inc. will introduce a breakthrough solution for the elderly, people with disabilities, caregivers, and service providers called “Network of Care”, a multilingual, community-based Web site that provides comprehensive long-term care services, information and education that is significant to the thousands of seniors and persons with disabilities who live in the Greater New Bedford area. Its debut will take place on Thursday, May 24, 2007, at Coastline’s offices located at 1646 Purchase Street in New Bedford. Local agencies/organizations are encouraged to attend.
Sponsored by a grant from the Area Agency on Aging, Network of Care for Seniors and People with Disabilities, is a program for the Southeastern Massachusetts area. To empower seniors and their caregivers, Network of Care helps people find the right service at the right time, educate themselves about their issues, find assistive devices, understand current policy initiatives and advocate directly to elected officials, and help them manage their affairs, interactions, and important records. The goal is to help the community age with dignity.
The Network of Care provides a comprehensive Service Directory of the service providers in the Greater New Bedford area, putting people in touch with the right services at the right time. Network of Care also provides easy to search libraries and vital information about specific disorders, pending legislation and advocacy, as well as daily news articles from around the world concerning aging and disabilities.
To increase accessibility and accommodate Network of Care’s users, the sites’s innovative technology provides near-universal access, regardless of literacy or income level, to Web-based services through a text-only version of the site and other adaptive technologies. The site is fully ADA-compliant and Bobby-approved. Network of Care also is available in multiple languages to include French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Service providers can share challenges and ideas, as well as create powerful new mechanisms to better service seniors, by embracing Network of Care’s communication tools such as message boards and community calendars. Service providers can even build their own free Web sites in for the For the Providers section.
Trilogy Integrated Resources LLC of San Rafael, California, create, developed and maintains Network of Care for Seniors and People with Disabilities and all of the other California Network of Care Web sites, including Network of Care for Mental/Behavioral Health, currently serving communities in ten states: Network of Care for Kids (ages 0-5); Network of Care for Children & Families (ages 0-18); Network of Care for Developmental Disabilities, and Network of Care for Domestic Violence. Based on requests from across the nation, Trilogy is also developing a Network of Care for substance abuse.