The Aspen Club: 13,700 Members and Most People Have Not Heard of It

There is an organization in Northern Colorado with more than 13,700 members that a surprising number of people have never heard of.

It is called the Aspen Club. UCHealth has run it since 1989. It is open to residents 50 and older in Larimer and Weld counties, and it is the sort of thing that only sounds unremarkable until you look at what is actually on the list.

We are starting a series of these. Not about Medicare, and not about us. Just about the organizations around here that adults 65 and older can walk into, and what is genuinely inside them. This is the first one.

What the Aspen Club actually is

It is a membership program, not a building you go to. You sign up once, and that opens the door to classes, screenings, counseling and a newsletter that lists what is coming up.

UCHealth publishes the program list. Here is what is on it:

• Health and wellness classes
• Chronic disease self-management classes
• Fall prevention programs
• Low-cost screenings — balance, blood pressure, hearing, and medication reviews
• Nutritional consultations
• CarFit assessments
• Caregiver education and resources
• Advance care planning education, including help completing the documents
• Medicare counseling and assistance
• Community resource information
• A newsletter every two months, which they describe as complimentary
• Cafeteria discounts at two UCHealth hospitals

Read that list twice, because three items on it are worth more than they look.

The three that matter most

Medication reviews

A low-cost medication review is on that list. If you have ever wanted somebody to look at everything you take at once — the prescriptions, the supplements, the thing your cardiologist added that your primary care doctor may not know about — this is one way to get that done.

We will say the obvious thing: your own pharmacist will also do this, usually at no charge, and we wrote a whole article about how to build a medication list worth handing to either one. Having two places that will do it is better than having one.

Fall prevention

This is the least glamorous item on the list and probably the most valuable. A fall is one of the few events that can change everything about how a person lives, in an afternoon. There is a large body of evidence that balance and strength programs reduce falls, and the Aspen Club runs both the classes and the balance screenings.

If you take a medication that makes you lightheaded when you stand up — and a great many blood pressure medications, some antidepressants and some prostate medications do — a balance screening is a reasonable thing to book. Do not stop or change a medication because of what a screening shows. Take the result to the prescriber and let them decide.

Advance care planning

They will sit with you and help you fill out the documents. Not a brochure about the documents. The documents.

Most people put this off for years and then a family member ends up making decisions in a hallway with no idea what the person would have wanted. An hour with somebody who does this every week is not a small thing.

Medicare counseling, and why we are telling you about it

Medicare counseling and assistance is on the Aspen Club's program list.

We are a Medicare agency. We are pointing you at somebody else who will talk to you about Medicare, at no cost to you, with no interest in which plan you end up on.

That is not an oversight. Anyone who will only tell you about the help that runs through them is telling you about a fraction of what is out there. If you want a second opinion on something we said, or you would rather start with somebody who is not licensed to sell anything at all, that is a completely reasonable way to go about it. The State Health Insurance Assistance Program does the same thing statewide, free, at 888-696-7213.

A good answer from somebody else beats a rushed one from us.

Where they are

There are four offices. Fort Collins and Greeley share a main number; Loveland and Longmont have their own.

• Fort Collins — 1025 Garfield Street, Suite A. 970-495-8560
• Greeley — 6906 W. 10th Street. 970-495-8560
• Loveland — 2500 Rocky Mountain Avenue. 970-624-1860
• Longmont — 1750 E. Ken Pratt Boulevard. 720-718-1690

Fort Collins office hours are published as Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Friday 8:30 a.m. to noon.

How to join, and how to see what is coming up

Two ways to sign up. Call the office nearest you from the list above, or fill in the form on UCHealth's website at uchealth.org.

The form asks for the ordinary things — name, date of birth, address, phone, how you would like the newsletter delivered — plus an emergency contact and whether you have an advance directive. That last one is not a trick question. It is how they know whether to offer you the planning session.

The newsletter is the part to actually pay attention to. The class and event schedule turns over every two months, so anything we printed here would be out of date by November. The current newsletter and the class calendar both live on that same page, and the newsletter is what tells you which of the programs above are running near you and when.

Why we are building this list

People ask us what else is out there, and until now we have been answering from memory, one person at a time. That is a bad way to run it.

So we are going to write these up properly — one organization at a time, with real addresses, real phone numbers, and what is actually inside. The senior centers in nine towns, the libraries, the county wellness classes, the volunteer organizations. For some questions we will point you at them rather than at us, and that is fine.

None of it requires you to talk to us. That is the point.

When Medicare is the question, ask your Good Day pharmacist about us. Before then, there is a lot of Northern Colorado that will help you for nothing, and most people never find out it is there.