Sunday, March 7, 2010

Long Care Services for Seniors

• Care selections are certainly shifting from a strictly health-related model to a social model

• People are more and more demanding and expecting additional options in care alternatives

• The aging of baby boomers will probably raise the demand for a broad variety of elderly care services and also options (maybe together with alternative medicines, and so on.)

• Services will turn out to be built-in: long-term care and acute care will be incorporated rather than separated (i.e. nursing home care in opposition to home care)

• "aging-in-place" will direct the structure and architecture of living options

• nursing home mattresses will decline considerably in number

• increasing "consumer-directed care" means that individuals will presume a more proactive position in the choice of service modalities and delivery of care. There may be elevated direct payments to beneficiaries that allow them to choose their own services.

• The overall tendency is away from institutional, medical-based models to social, community-based, residential or home-like models, even for acute care.

• Remote Monitoring Technology is becoming more and more important and can lower Emergency Room trips and hospitalizations by significant numbers.

• Funding accountability for long-term care is shifting from the federal government to states, individuals and their families. Consumers will have to think much more seriously about how exactly to plan and pay for their future long-term care needs.

• The American population is aging quickly concurrently the

the supply of non-paid health care providers is declining - a lot of traditional family caregivers are returning in greater numbers to the workplace. Families have lesser number of kids (reducing the number of potential family caregiver pool). Many families are getting increased geographically distant from each other, resulting in the importance for an increased pool of compensated caregivers

• In the foreseeable future, the labor force, in general, will be declining at the same time that those needing long-term care services is increasing

• The aging of the population will place an escalating strain on Medicaid programs, which are intended for nursing home care, not long-term care. Congress is transmitting a clear message that the government has no purpose of establishing a brand new, government-sponsored, long-term care entitlement program.

• Long-term care staffing shortages need to be addressed and the workforce developed to fulfill the expected increasing need

• Many states (particularly Oregon and Washington) have explicitly recognized nursing homes as the setting of last resort, and have blatantly reduced the number of nursing home beds, or (as in Minnesota) placed a moratorium on new nursing home beds.

• As baby boomers age, housing developers are going to be paying more consideration to the physical design of homes and there may be more demand to build homes where individuals can age in place.

For more information on Senior Home Health Care visit:
Retire-At-Home Health Care Services
100-1704 Carling Avenue
Ottawa, ON K2A 1C7
(613) 798-5111?
http://www.retireathomeottawa.com