Maria Zamora, Chief Executive Officer at Center for Elders’ Independence Featured on Keep Up With PACE Podcast

Dr. Ankur Patel, host of the Keep Up With PACE podcast, interviews our own Maria Zamora, Chief Executive Officer of CEI and Chair and Executive Committee member of the Board of Directors for the National PACE Association (NPA). She also serves as Vice Chair and Executive Committee member of the Board of Directors for California PACE Association (CalPACE).

Maria talks about the power of the PACE model of care and tells a heartwarming story about a participant and her young, caregiving daughter. She explains how PACE can not only be impactful to individual participants, but can also be impactful to whole families and communities.

“They heard about PACE and they came into the center to visit,” Maria says. “She was an amazing caregiver, this young woman, she was so protective of her mother and she was a little hesitant about leaving her at the center. So she came in and attended with her for a few days at first, until she had a comfort level that she saw her mother was doing well. She started to see the changes in her mother’s affect in her personality in a positive way when she would come home at the end of a center day. She (the daughter) gained enough trust in us that she reenrolled in college. She was staring to engage with her friends again and a really remarkable thing is, the physical appearance of both women when they first came, they were tired, disheveled, wearing sweats, and as time went on, they both came in and their hair was done and their makeup was done, they were well dressed – you know we present outwardly what we are feeling internally sometimes – and we saw this transformation in both the mother and her caregiver daughter with the support of PACE.”

To hear this story and much more, listen to the Keep Up With PACE podcast with Maria Zamora and host, Dr. Ankur Patel. Click Here to Listen