October 22, 2025
By Charles de Vilmorin
In long-term care and senior living, the promise has always been more than simply keeping people safe. Families and residents alike choose communities because they want to experience living longer, better—not just surviving but thriving with purpose, joy, and connection.
Delivering on this promise requires more than excellent medical oversight. It depends on an essential partnership between life enrichment and clinical care, two disciplines that for too long have been seen as separate or even competing.
At its core, true person-centered care means addressing the whole person. Every resident brings a unique life story, set of preferences, health conditions, and social needs. Clinical teams focus on diagnoses, medications, care planning, and safety. Life enrichment teams focus on meaningful activities, engagement, and wellness.
Only when these two perspectives are integrated can communities truly meet the psycho-social and clinical needs of each older adult.
When either side of the equation is lacking or inadequate, there is a risk of delivering incomplete care. A resident may have excellent medication management but live in loneliness and depression, or they may have daily activities available, but these don’t align with their mobility or cognitive needs. The intersection of enrichment and clinical is where real outcomes—and authentic quality of life—are created.
Historically, life enrichment has not been fully respected as a professional discipline. Too often, it was viewed as "just activities"—a nice-to-have rather than a core component of care. Meanwhile, the clinical world was incentivized to focus almost exclusively on the medical components of aging: vital signs, treatment plans, and acute interventions.
This created silos in communities where enrichment staff felt under-resourced and under-recognized, while clinical staff carried the burden of care without the benefit of holistic support.
The result? A fragmented resident experience, one that may keep someone alive but not truly connected, purposeful, or well.
Why value-based care changes everything
The healthcare landscape is shifting. With the rise of value-based care, communities and health partners will no longer be driven by delivering more procedures. Instead, they are rewarded for delivering better outcomes and care that is cost-effective, and these can only be achieved by considering the whole person.
When life enrichment and clinical care work hand in hand, the results are powerful:
- Reduced hospitalizations: Residents who are engaged socially and emotionally are less likely to experience avoidable emergency department and/or hospital visits.
- Improved chronic disease outcomes: Participation in integrated social and wellness activities has been shown to reduce the burden of conditions like diabetes, heart disease, depression, and dementia.
- Sustainable wellness strategies: Embedding enrichment into the daily culture of care drives long-term change that benefits residents, families, and staff. Wellness becomes a priority that is integrated on an ongoing basis, with a goal of helping residents not only live longer but also better.
This is why the partnership is not optional—it’s essential.
Current challenges
Despite progress, several challenges remain in aligning life enrichment and clinical work:
- Lack of data: While clinical teams have decades of standardized measures, enrichment outcomes are still under-documented and, thus, not widely leveraged as a method of measuring wellness impact. Without data, it is impossible to prove ROI or gain equal respect. However, healthcare is becoming more data-driven, and we can expect to see more information about enrichment as part of the care plan and goals of care.
- Limited shared outcomes: Communities often lack a common framework to measure success across enrichment and clinical dimensions, leading to fragmented reporting.
- Gaps in education: Clinical teams are rarely trained in psycho-social wellness, while enrichment professionals may not always have the tools to connect their work to medical outcomes. Moving forward, training and education need to include a broader range of team members to ensure quality, consistent care, identify unmet resident needs, and drive the best possible outcomes.
Bridging these gaps is the key to the future of senior living.
Voices from the field
To understand what this partnership looks like in practice, I spoke with Jamie Johnson, LPN, CDP, CMDCP, corporate director of memory care with Merrill Gardens, who has intentionally built bridges between life enrichment and clinical care. Here’s what she had to say:
"For too long, assisted living communities have inadvertently put up walls, separating the team that handles clinical care from the team that focuses on engagement, the part that makes life meaningful. A resident’s physical health, mental state, and quality of life are intrinsically linked. Ignoring one to prioritize the other leads to fragmented care, increased stress, and a diminished sense of self for the resident.
It all starts with recognizing the vital relationship between our clinical and engagement teams truly coming together. This means our engagement leaders have the same respect and voice as our clinical leaders; moreover, we actively encourage input from the entire care team, ensuring resident preferences are woven into daily care decisions.
This partnership allows us to identify the best holistic approach for every resident. For example, when a resident with recurrent falls (a key clinical metric) fully engages in purposeful programming, both teams monitor the resulting reduction in falls and the increase in social participation (our engagement metric). We are actively working with technology partners to access quantifiable data that conclusively demonstrates this truth: engaged residents have better clinical outcomes. While cultural change is an ongoing effort that takes time, this teamwork confirms one powerful reality: you simply cannot have high-quality care without high-quality living.
The future of assisted living will be defined by seamless, collaborative partnerships between our clinical and engagement teams, recognizing that every intervention—whether it’s medication management or a social activity—is part of a holistic care plan. Smart technology will play a vital role by instantly cross-referencing clinical outcomes with engagement data, providing us with quantitative proof that purpose equals wellness. This long-overdue cultural shift fosters an ecosystem where care is truly defined by purpose, dignity, and partnership, ensuring every resident experiences life as meaningful, not merely managed. Engagement departments will receive the proper financial investment and recognition, as investing in a resident’s meaning and purpose is one of the most effective strategies we have, dramatically reducing adverse health events and elevating their quality of life."
This success translates directly to a longer, healthier stay in their community, offering a clear return on investment and demonstrating increased revenue—a true win-win for both resident well-being and the financial stability of the community.
Living longer, better—together
The future of long-term care and senior living depends on communities that deliver on the promise of living longer, better. That means moving beyond silos and embracing a model where enrichment and clinical teams are equal partners and work together, where social engagement is documented alongside vital signs, where wellness plans are as personalized as medication plans, and where outcomes are measured not only by survival, but by the joy, purpose, and connection residents experience each day.
The industry has the tools, the evidence, and the mandate to act. What remains is the will to honor life enrichment as a core component of care, and to unite it fully with the clinical world. Together, these two disciplines hold the key to transforming senior living—so that every older adult truly lives longer, better.
Originally published on McKnight's Long-Term Care News.