Back from the Alzheimer's Association of the Northwest. Walking the aisles of the exhibit floor, one could get the impression that the key for family members and professionals is finding a good home care agency or assisted living placement. Which reminds me, that despite the best of intentions in the aging services worlds, I rarely see evidence that it is at the top of the priority lists of these organizations to ensure that those they serve know what technologies might be of some benefit to them. (The exception is LeadingAge (formerly AAHSA) which has sponsored CAST -- check out the link that LeadingAge CAST has just released an analysis of state payments for Aging Services Technologies (AST). But I digress, here are some technologies to mitigate various issues confronted by caregivers -- some mentioned previously in random posts. Please comment with other suggestions or any feedback about these vendors or suggest additional products:
Our future eldercare world -- too many of us, not enough trained workers. One might want to argue with whether the current ratio is adequate, but as presented in the most recent journal of the American Society on Aging (ASA), Generations, it seems that an additional 3.5 million workers will be needed by 2030 just to maintain the current ratio of healthcare workers to an aging population -- across all aspects of care delivery. How likely are these workers to be there? A long list of negatives (stats and cited studies are from this journal) imperil the possibility -- here are just a few of them:
Chinese mandate visiting aging parents. This article is quite intriguing -- the Chinese are now experiencing the law of unintended consequences -- their one-child policy created a downstream eldercare issue. No siblings to split the responsibility, dispersed families and a government worried about the cost of care. So they have proposed a law mandating that family members visit their aging parents at a frequency to be named, plus 'pay medical expenses for the elderly suffering from illnesses and provide them with nursing care." I wonder -- what is a visit -- does Skype count? A phone call? How can this be verified? This was based on a very real worry by the government that the social net programs will be overwhelmed by 2020 (250 million over the age of 65). So isn't the exact same phenomenon happening in the US? And what does it mean to the future of safety net programs if 20% of US women had no children at all?
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Starting this year, more than 10,000 baby boomers a day will turn 65. As these baby boomers age, one of out of eight of them will develop Alzheimer's – a devastating, costly, heartbreaking disease. Increasingly for these Baby Boomers, it will no longer be their grandparents and parents who have Alzheimer's – it will be them.
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Researchers have long known that music and spirituality have therapeutic effects on an individual’s health, but for most healthcare providers, traditional one-on-one therapies have been too costly and difficult to implement. To address the problem, Coro Health, LLC has developed a suite of web-based audio products that delivers individual music prescriptions, spirituality and other media to thousands of residents in long-term care facilities.
