Future Of Health Care And The Elderly Geriatric Medicine

As the first of the nation's 78 million baby boomers begin reaching age 65 in 2011, they will face a health care workforce that is too small and woefully unprepared to meet their specific health needs. Retooling for an Aging America calls for bold initiatives starting immediately to train all health care providers in the basics of geriatric care and to prepare family members and other informal caregivers, who currently receive little or no training in how to tend to their aging loved ones. The book also recommends that Medicare, Medicaid, and other health plans pay higher rates to boost recruitment and retention of geriatric specialists and care aides. Educators and health professional groups can use Retooling for an Aging America to institute or increase formal education and training in geriatrics. Consumer groups can use the book to advocate for improving the care for older adults. Health care professional and occupational groups can use it to improve the quality of health care jobs.

This book highlights both recent innovations in professional health curricula and continuing education and interventions aimed at improving student attitudes towards geriatrics and aging. The contributors cover areas including simulation, online training, and standardized patients for evaluation, but also emphasize the important end-result of clinical training: to take care of real older adults outside the classroom. Importantly, this underscores the development of powerful learning experiences of students by sensitizing them to the frameworks of palliative care, cancer care, sexuality, and aging research, all of which serves as a powerful catalyst for creating a ‘pipeline’ of students who embrace aging as a central theme of their future work. As increased training in geriatrics is required to attune the health care workforce to the needs of older adults, this book will be of interest to those seeking to create a more age-friendly healthcare curriculum. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Gerontology & Geriatrics Education journal.

This issue of Clinics in Geriatric Medicine focuses on the past, present, and future of home health care, a rapidly growing subspecialty of Geriatric Medicine. Guest Edited by Peter Boling, the issue describes the population in need (age range, numbers, projected growth), range of service needs, social vs. medical models of care, international and state-to-state comparisons to show the wide range of strategies that have been tried. It also includes a brief snapshot of the history of home care research, absence of integration of medical model home care and continuity of care for home-bound and function-limited persons in the US.

This book offers an up-to-date review on the principles and practice of multidimensional assessment and management of the older individual, which represents the cornerstone of modern clinical practice in the elderly. The early chapters cover the main elements and scope of the comprehensive geriatric approach and explain the pathways of care from screening and case finding through to in-depth assessment and treatment planning. Subsequent chapters review the evidence of how best to apply the multidimensional assessment and management approach in defined healthcare settings and within specific clinical areas, such as cancer and surgery. Finally, the education and training challenges are reviewed and the prospects for future clinical service and research in this important field are examined. The book is very timely given the recent advances in application of this approach, which reflect the growing international realization that older people are “core business” in many clinical areas where the role of specialist geriatric medicine has hitherto been limited. Accordingly, the book will be relevant to a wide range of clinicians. The authorship comprises many of the best known and widely published experts in their respective fields.

For much of the developed world, health care for a surging elderly population looms as one of the most daunting problems of the coming decade. In this book, contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and countries discuss resource allocation for the elderly and debate plans for the years ahead. Essays focus on five general issues: the meaning of old age, the goals of medicine and health care for the elderly, the balance between the needs of the young and old, the pressures of other social priorities, and the role of families, especially the burden on women, in long-term care. In consideration of the difficult moral and practical issues involved, the editors conclude the volume with a special report containing policy recommendations from representatives of eight countries (the United States, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). This important volume will be of interest to policymakers and a broad spectrum of health care professionals, as well as to anyone interested in the fate of the elderly or in coming health care challenges.

Savvy, comprehensive, and authoritative, this book, written by a physician with more than thirty years experience caring for elderly patients, assesses the current state and the future prospects of Medicare, perhaps the most influential health-insurance program of our time. Christine K. Cassel draws upon the latest developments in science and medicine in a sweeping analysis of Medicare s social, demographic, institutional, political, and policy contexts. Writing in accessible language, using case studies to illustrate how policies translate to everyday lives, and applying lessons from the practice of geriatric medicine, Cassel makes a powerful argument for reforming and modernizing Medicare. She offers a new vision of what healthy aging could be and delineates what is needed to realize this vision, including changes in the medical sector, in the policy arena, and in our cultural beliefs about aging. Cassel sheds light on a wide range of issues pertaining to Medicare, including debates about coverage and the looming deficit in the Medicare trust fund. Perhaps the most controversial issue she addresses is the challenge of rationing some kinds of care. Anchoring her discussion of Medicare in the idea that care for the elderly represents a social contract between government and its citizens, Cassel describes both the principles and potential of a progressive approach to geriatric medicine. She further argues that with this approach, we can also address the chronic problems of our larger health-care system and provide all Americans, no matter what their age, with high-quality and affordable medical care.