Virginia Bell, MSW, has spent a lifetime being a friend to humanity. Married to a minister, she nurtured and contributed generously to her community while raising their five children. Before her husband retired, Ms. Bell pursued a master’s degree in social work, which she completed in 1982 at age sixty from the University of Kentucky. She counseled families at the University of Kentucky’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and learned to appreciate the unique challenges faced by people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia and their care partners. Her response was to establish the Helping Hand Adult Day Center (now the Best Friends Adult Day Center) in Lexington, Kentucky, to provide the kind of care she believed these families needed most. Ms. Bell has subsequently trained innumerable staff, students, and volunteers nationally and internationally in the practices and attitudes that embody the Best Friends approach.
She has earned awards for leadership in her community and in the Alzheimer’s field and has published four other books with her coauthor, David Troxel, about using the Best Friends approach in professional care settings (The Best Friends Approach to Alzheimer’s Care; The Best Friends Staff: Building a Culture of Care in Alzheimer’s Programs; and The Best Friends Book of Alzheimer’s Activities, Volumes 1 and 2; all published by Health Professions Press).
Today, when she isn’t spending time with her family, which now includes twelve grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, she is traveling around the nation and throughout the world bearing the good news that much can be done to improve the lives of those affected by Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia.
With a long history in the field of public health, David Troxel, MPH, has dedicated his professional life to improving the well-being of the public at large and people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia specifically. After earning his master’s degree in public health, Mr. Troxel worked at the University of Kentucky Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, which at the time was one of only ten federally funded Alzheimer’s research centers in the country. It was there he met and began to collaborate with Virginia Bell to improve education and services in the state of Kentucky for people with dementia and their care partners. He was the first executive director of the Lexington/Bluegrass chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association (now called the Greater Kentucky and Southern Indiana chapter) and, together with Ms. Bell, he won an unprecedented four Excellence in Program Awards from the national Alzheimer’s Association for his chapter’s patient and family programs.
From 1994 to 2004, Mr. Troxel was Executive Director of the California Central Coast chapter (formerly the Santa Barbara & Ventura County chapters) of the Alzheimer’s Association, where he developed innovative dementia care programs with a dedicated staff and group of volunteers. Today he works as a writer, speaker, and long-term care/dementia care consultant based in Sacramento, California.
Mr. Troxel has also been a family caregiver, supporting his mother, Dorothy, who passed away from Alzheimer’s disease in 2008 after a ten-year journey with the disease.
In addition to the books he has co-written with Ms. Bell on their Best Friends philosophy, together they have written a series of influential journal articles on topics ranging from spirituality, to staff training and development, to person-centered care, including the widely reprinted Alzheimer’s Disease Bill of Rights. A well-traveled speaker and advocate, Mr. Troxel has inspired professionals around the world to start making sorely needed changes in the culture of care for the millions of people living with dementia.
To learn more about Virginia’s and David’s work, visit them on the Web at www.bestfriendsapproach.com or at www.facebook.com/bestfriendsapproach.