Effectiveness of Long-term Care to Elderly
Do you believe that long-term care is effective in meeting the needs of the elderly at this time? Why or why not?
The increasing number of elderly people faced with chronic diseases has posed the need to provide them with financial and long-term care. Long term care is critical in improving the quality of life and survival of the elderly. However, the duration of need for the care becomes expensive and burdensome to the individuals and families. In this regard, this paper argues that long-term care is not effective in meeting the needs of the elderly at this time. The paper describes various reasons as to why long-term care is ineffective.
The rapidly aging population in most countries has led to an increase in the number of unmet long-term care needs. Long term care entails providing services to the elderly to meet their personal and health needs. The services are intended to enable the elderly to live in a safe environment and independently especially due to their inability to perform their daily activities as a result of their advanced age and chronic diseases (Alldred et al. 2016). The most common services are personal which include bathing, grooming, and dressing, moving around, and eating. Ineffectiveness in providing long-term care is prompted by various factors such as high costs of services and shortage of beds. The greatest concerns about the long-term system regard costs and efficiency. According to Alldred et al. (2016), the costs of long-term care amounted to approximately 50 billion dollars in 1985. The costs for providing long-term care are high and hence few individuals can afford them. This means that the elderly who are unable to cater for such expenses end up suffering for lack of such services. The study has indicated that only the elderly from rich backgrounds access and afford long-term services unlike those from poor backgrounds (Brenna & Gitto, 2017). As a result, the poor elderly individuals die at earlier ages than rich ones who live a little bit longer since they afford the expensive long-term care services. Notably, as the rise in the costs of such care increases, the burden is normally transferred to the public sector.
The resources required for providing long-term care are insufficient and hence providing long term care to the elderly is not effective. For instance, the high number of elderly individuals faced with chronic diseases has necessitated the shortage of nursing home beds. In this regard, some elderly with chronic diseases end up being discharged while they have not fully recovered to give space for new admissions. This poses ineffective long-term services because the discharged mal-recovered elderly individuals have their recovery period prolonged for poor health care provisions (Brenna & Gitto, 2017). In prompt to this, the home-based care services have taken the lead in the recent past. However, such services are still only affordable by few individuals due to the decline in the availability of family caregivers.
I believe that long-term care is not effective in meeting the needs of the elderly at this time. While the elderly are mostly faced with chronic diseases, it prompts them in need of long-term care. Although the health care bodies and the government of most countries have strived to provide long-term care to the elderly, it has proved to be quite difficult to meet their needs. The high costs of such services are the biggest challenge. Considering that the elderly require constant attention poses a burden to the family and society in general. The shortage of beds in health care centers is also a big challenge.
References
Alldred, D. P., Kennedy, M. C., Hughes, C., Chen, T. F., & Miller, P. (2016). Interventions to
optimise prescribing for older people in care homes. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (2).
Brenna, E., & Gitto, L. (2017). To what extent is long-term care representative of elderly care?
A case study of elderly care financing in Lombardy, Italy. International journal of health policy and management, 6(8), 467.
