Elder Care
          Digest

• Nursing Home Volunteers
• Resistance to Self Funded Health Care
• Proposed Developments in Elder-Care Technology
• Elder Care Speaker/Author Now Blogging on Health Site
• Providing Assisted Living Care for Low Income Seniors
• Check for Changes in Nursing Home Ownership or Management
• Helping Seniors
  

Nursing Home Volunteers

Volunteering at a nursing home can be a truly enriching experience.  Positive Lights volunteers participated in nursing home visits in a variety of ways:  they organized an "ice cream social", assisted in taking residents to a chili cook-off, and visited one-on-one with lonely residents.  Groups of ten to almost thirty volunteers, including small children through senior citizens, regularly visited nursing homes and led exercise activities and sing-alongs.  We found that residents were skeptical at first, but after months of regular semi-weekly visits, almost every resident who was able actively participated.  

Some of the most moving experiences were when residents who seldom responded to anyone started talking and even catching a foam ball.  Both the staff and the volunteers shed tears of joy when unresponsive residents would actually look at what was going on around them and smile with pleasure. As much as we would like to think we gave to the residents, we got far, far more in return.  (Gregg Gimlin, President, Positive Lights, inc.) 

You don't have to participate with a group to be a volunteer. Here is a story from the Chicago Tribune on other volunteer activities.

Resistance to Self Funded Health Care  

The solution to the escalating cost of health care in the U.S. is not one that most seniors want to contemplate. 

Logically, any benefit that an insurance company will pay for has to be covered by the premiums that are paid. Otherwise the insurance company will go broke and they know that better than their customers. If the insurance company is to pay for routine expenses, they will include that in the premiums and will mark up the cost to include their overhead, administration and marketing expenses. The most sensible kind of medical insurance is major medical. This is coverage that has large deductibles and co-insurance but provides greater protection for unusual and catastrophic injuries or illnesses. Minor and repetitive expenses are paid by the insured. 

Obviously, if an employer or the government is going to pay for the insurance, then the employees and Medicare beneficiaries will want the maximum amount of coverage. But that encourages people to approve procedures or testing that they probably would not choose if they had to pay for it themselves. Due to the threat of lawsuits and the lack of resistance from patients, doctors are encouraged to employ test procedures of marginal value to the patient. 

When someone else is paying the bill, everyone will insist on having the most expensive form of medical care rather than making tough choices. The result is that prices escalate because there is hardly any genuine restraint on the cost of health care. After many decades of excessive increases in health care costs, the government is pressuring insurance companies and insurers are pressuring employers (or Medicare recipients) to share more of the cost of the insurance. There is every indication this trend will continue and that employees and Medicare recipients will be forced to shoulder an increasing part of the cost of health care for themselves.  

Some information about major medical insurance is available at

http://www.healthinsuranceindepth.com/basics-how-it-works.html

http://www.ahipresearch.com/pdfs/Individual_Insurance_Survey_Report8-26-2005.pdf

Proposed Developments in Elder-Care Technology

Video cameras monitoring an elderly person's movement patterns in a room would go far in eliminating the need for costly and inconvenient human intervention. Since the computer capturing the video signals is able to detect anomalies in movement (such as a fall), an alarm would sound upon detection of such, and appropriate help is called for. (Wisdom Uncommon)

Elder Care Speaker/Author Now Blogging on Health Site

Columnist/author/speaker Carol Bradley Bursack, author of "Minding Our Elders: Caregivers Share Their Personal Stories," is now blogging on OurAlzheimers.com, part of the Health Central Network. Bursack is a regular on national radio writes articles on elder care.

Providing Assisted Living Care for Low Income Seniors

Assisted living centers are practical options for many seniors, but what about seniors who have very low incomes?  In Southern Illinois, of the 45,984 people in a four-county area, 18 percent were seniors, and 77 percent of the senior population had an income below $15,000 a year.  Read about the opportunities provided to low-income seniors in Southern Illinois and how similar programs might be available elsewhere.

The Southern Illinoisan » Home Health Series Part 3 - Assisted Living: Independent, affordable, apartment style living for seniors is a reality

Check for Changes in Nursing Home Ownership or Management

One problem in selecting a nursing home is that no matter how good it is today, a change in ownership or even a change in the home's Director could mean that the care will be significantly different within a short time.  Being able to get current data on North Carolina nursing homes is the subject of this article. For your State, you might check out your Department of Aging or its equivalent. 

The article notes that for North Carolina, the records will indicate whether nursing homes have been fined or cited for serious violations that endangered residents. Those records are already available at www.medicare.gov, but that's a national listing, making it a little more difficult for users to navigate to a particular home in North Carolina.  Our view: Online nursing home records a plus

Helping Seniors

The Network for Enriched Seniors in Training will help provide trained volunteers to staff Citizens Helping Individual Retired People, the commission's senior care program that was established in 2005 following the start-up of 24-hour telephone service. The citizens group is organized around seven volunteer teams providing services such as Meals on Wheels in time of need; assistance with household tasks; providing sitting services to senior caregivers; regular phone calls and house visits; offering group counseling to grieving seniors; visiting seniors at home or in hospitals; and arranging for transportation to doctors. 

Source: Miami Herald, July 23, 2006