“Insurance pays little for caregiving of elderly at end of life,” by Ronnie Cohen, Reuters “Unpaid family and friends provide the overwhelming majority of care to the elderly in their last year of life, according to a new study highlighting the need to expand supportive services to caregivers. . . . In 2011, 2.3 million caregivers tended to the needs of an estimated 905,000 older Americans in their final year of life, the report in Health Affairs found. Nearly 9 in 10 of the caregivers were unpaid, and only 9 percent of dying older adults received money for caregiving from
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“2 of 3 Americans Don’t Have ‘Advance Directive’ for End of Life,” by Robert Preidt, HealthDay “The research looked at data from more than 795,000 Americans. Just 29 percent had completed a living will that contained specific end-of-life care wishes, and 33 percent had designated a health care power of attorney. Completion of advance directives was slightly higher among patients with chronic illnesses (38 percent) than among healthy adults (33 percent), and much higher among patients 65 and older (46 percent) than among younger adults (32 percent), the findings showed.” LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term
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“One Woman’s Slide From Middle Class to Medicaid,” by Ron Lieber, New York Times “A dozen or so years into retirement, Rita Sherman had plenty going for her financially. Recently widowed, she had a net worth of roughly $600,000 as of 1998. Her health was excellent, and she dutifully purchased a long-term care insurance policy that would cover three years of nursing home costs should she ever need help. Watching over it all was her daughter, a medical social worker, and her son-in-law, a financial planner. By the time she died at the age of 94 last year, however, all
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“Serious head injuries nearly double your risk of dementia,” by Andy Coghlan, New Scientist “Serious head injuries nearly double a person’s risk of developing dementia. That’s the message from an analysis of over 40,000 people who sustained some kind of head injury between 1986 and 2014. Half the people in the study had moderate-to-severe head injuries, which cause lesions in the brain and require a person to stay in hospital for three days or more. The other half had milder head injuries with no lesions, and were able to go home within a day. Comparing the longer-term health of these
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“Falls associated with higher rate of adverse events than previously thought,” by Lois A. Bowers, McKnight’s Senior Living “Newly published research offers a reason for more urgency for the prevention of falls in senior living residents and other older adults. The investigators found that 50.3% of adults aged 65 or more years who visited an emergency department because they were injured in a fall experienced adverse events — including additional falls, hospitalization or death — within six months after the visit. Their findings were published online Wednesday in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine.” LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses, President,
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“Can poor sleep lead to Alzheimer’s?,” by Sandee LaMotte, CNN “One in three Americans doesn’t get enough sleep, and 45% of the world’s population doesn’t, either. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls that a ‘public health problem,’ because disrupted sleep is associated with a higher risk of conditions including diabetes, stroke and cardiovascular disease. . . . A few studies in cognitively normal people and one in mice have shown a connection between chronic sleep disruption and the development of amyloid plaques. The research in mice was particularly interesting because it showed that mice who slept well
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“Poor Patient Care at Many Nursing Homes Despite Stricter Oversight,” by Jordan Rau, New York Times “While special focus status is one of the federal government’s strictest forms of oversight, nursing homes that were forced to undergo such scrutiny often slide back into providing dangerous care, according to an analysis of federal health inspection data. Of 528 nursing homes that graduated from special focus status before 2014 and are still operating, slightly more than half — 52 percent — have since harmed patients or put patients in serious jeopardy within the past three years. . . . Yet, despite recurrences
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“Older adults increasingly using mobile devices to access information,” by Lois A. Bowers, McKnight’s Senior Living “Don’t exclude mobile from your efforts to market to older adults who are prospective residents or family members or to communicate with them once a move-in has taken place, suggests newly released information from the Pew Research Center. Sixty-seven percent of Americans aged 65 or more years now access news on mobile devices, according to center interviews with more than 4,100 adults between March 13 and 27. That’s a 24-percentage-point increase over the past year and approximately three times the share of four years
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“Guess What? There Are No Cuts in Medicaid,” by Daniel J. Mitchell, Foundation for Economic Education (FEE.org) “Senate Republicans have produced their Obamacare repeal legislation, though as I noted at the end of this interview, it’s really more a bill about Medicaid reform than Obamacare repeal. While it’s disappointing that big parts of Obamacare are left in place, it’s definitely true that Medicaid desperately needs reform, ideally by shifting the program to the states, thus replicating the success of welfare reform. But critics are savaging this idea, implying that ‘deep cuts’ will hurt the quality of care. Indeed, some of
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“New technology aims to provide peace and positive stimulation to dementia patients,” Science Daily “Many people living with dementia reside in long-term care facilities, where the lack of stimulation can result in behaviors such as hitting, screaming, and wandering. Common measures to avoid such “responsive” behaviors, such as antipsychotic medications and personalized recreational and music therapy programs, can cause adverse health effects in the former case and be difficult for staff to find time to carry out in the latter case. A team of human factors/ergonomics researchers helped to evaluate and refine Ambient Activity (or AA; Ambient Activity Technologies Inc.),
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