Like many other nations, the United States is fast reaching crisis point when it comes to care and support for the senior population.
Much of this comes from the tremendous growth in the elderly population. This was particularly evident from the 2010 Census, and U.S. Census Bureau produced the graph below to illustrate the pattern:
Image from United States Census Bureau
To make matters worse, the senior population in the United States grew 15.1% from 2000 to 2010. In that same time period, the general population grew just 9.7%.
Projections suggest that by 2050, there will be almost 84 million people aged 65 and above (1).
There are a number of factors that contribute to this pattern. One is the fact that the baby boomer generation is reaching retirement. At the same time, modern medicine helps people to live longer, while many families are choosing to have fewer children or have them later in life.
The growth in the elderly population is particularly concerning as many of our systems and facilities are already stretched. For example, projections suggest that an additional 1.6 million direct care workers will be needed by 2020 (2). The majority of direct care workers are women, yet this number is far higher than the number of women estimated to enter the workforce in the same period.
This creates a major problem in the provision of care.
To a degree, family members and informal caregivers will help to fill that gap – as they do already. People in these roles act to support aging family members, helping them to stay in the home longer.
Yet, as many of you may know, being a caregiver in this way is incredibly stressful and challenging.
In many cases, people have financial and work-based commitments that limit their ability to act as a caregiver or prevent them from doing so altogether.
Furthermore, the amount of support for informal caregivers tends to be minimal.
For example, there are relatively few governmental policies aimed at providing funding or other forms of support to informal caregivers. Likewise, this type of caregiver is frequently under trained and under prepared for what they need to do.
In many cases, caregivers can feel like they’re in over their heads and may be confused about the best things ways to proceed and how to make the decisions that they need to.
The lack of support for informal caregivers really makes the entire problem worse.
After all, this type of caregiving is likely to become absolutely critical, as it is hard to imagine how the availability of direct care workers could ever meet the growing demand.
This suggests that in order to provide the necessary care for older adults, the government is going to need to place increasing focus on informal caregivers and their importance in the current system and in the future.
Yet, it remains unclear whether this will actually happen.
Certainly, the current presidential debate is doing little to alleviate concern about the aging population and there is relatively little focus on ways to resolve the issues.
It will be interesting to see how things develop in the years to come but two things remain clear, we are fast approaching a crisis with senior care and we have few tools to ensure that seniors do receive the care they need.
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