The USA has an experience of extreme growth of aging population that is in need of long-term care services, which are from in-home care to facility residential care. Considering this need, a lot of challenges and solutions appear before people, who are involved in the process of taking care of patients with various mental health conditions and interventions. This paper is to clarify the opportunities and challenges of mental health services and long-term care, which are created for people engaged in providing health care. This way, the necessary skills and knowledge of health care and nursing home administrators will be discussed in order to have the ability to meet the challenges of two service types.
Challenges
Long-term care includes different medical and social services, which are implemented for helping people with some chronic care needs or disabilities. One of the most essential challenges in long-term care is the lack of money. Various government programs exist in order to provide means or resources to assist people, but they are not able to cover the whole industry of health care. Some care facilities suffer from lack of equipment or furniture. This way, the conditions are not acceptable, and less and less potential patients ask for professional help. Instead of it, they prefer surrendering to their fates and spend the rest of their lives alone, without any assistance.
Knowledge and skills
Different health care organizations provide patients with care and medicine in order to bring some improvements to the statistics of the aging population suffering from lack of care. People watch their health conditions at the nursing home or act as health care administrators do. The nature of long-term care is the essential part of the treatment, too. In order to ensure patients with obligatory care, community-based facilities operate. There the patients are able to watch after each other, which provide them with higher responsibility and eagerness to live as long as possible. Moreover, community-based care is the way to save costs and satisfy families` or patients` preferences towards health care.
Challenges
When considering institutional care, it is important to count all the costs: health services, physicians and nurses along with food and accommodations, which patients, who are at home care, pay with their own money. During this type of care the time of caring is saved, so the family members should not lose their working places in order to take long-term care of someone.
According to the studies of Polivka (2012) the USA has the most fragmented long-term care system and the lowest financing for services among other developed countries. The reason for such results may be the difficulties in managing such kinds of care services. Some authorities are involved in market competition, which requires money for charity in exchange for better reputation and significant place in society for those businessmen, who help people and facilities with long-term care.
This way, it is important to provide various facilities with necessary accommodation and supply of money. Taking into account significant percentage of aged patients, who need long-term health care, one should think over improving the country`s health care system and constitute the plan of supply patients and facilities with indispensable medicine or qualified nurses or health care administrators. To develop the health care system of a country, the government should change its allocation for funds. In addition to it, individuals and charity providers have to join the program of increasing the efficiency of health care facilities in the long run.
Solutions
There are some ways to ensure the system with some solutions. For example, Andy Lord proposed the system of exchanging money along with long-term care insurance – aged people went in for long-term care and paid for it, but in the case of not using policy benefits for this kind of treatment, the money spent for care would go back to their families (Kearsley, 2012). This kind of money saving in exchange for the use of long-term care becomes the method of expenditures of resources, which are collected as inheritance.
A lot of aged people forget about their health state in order to provide their children and grandchildren with better lives through their money storage, but the solution of long-term care provided by Andy Lord seems to be satisfactory for all the old people from all over the world. For most cases it should work well with significant effectiveness, even though the cases of disinclination take care of themselves.
The implementation of SAMHSA may be effective if using its principles properly. The representatives of SAMHSA build the public`s awareness of the importance of taking care of the health state of aged people (SAMSHA staff, 2016). They do it by supporting different innovations, which have to help the public, any-ways. SAMHSA`s mission of improving health care system is focused on watching changes and bringing various strategies to be proper implementation. Best practices and statistics are collected in order to analyze them and modify long-term care facilities based on the conclusion made.
All in all, one may point out diverse the challenges and solutions for long-term care, which roots lay in human nature. It is difficult to provide health care facilities with all the equipment, which may help take control over aged people with physical or mental health issues. Governments should emit money for procuring different facilities with accommodation, furniture, qualified nurse staff and devices, which will help to take care of patients. Agreements of conditions are the methods to coerce aged people to join long-term care. Moreover, such agreements provide them with insurance in their inheritance, so they are very effective among patients. There are also some programs and organizations, which stand for charity and helping people with different disabilities. This way, the system of long-term care can be saved and improved if joining various forces.
References
Kearsley, K. (2012). Clients Embrace Adviser's Long-Term Care Solution. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204076204578076642026076024
Polivka, L. (2012). The Challenge of Long-Term Care. Next Avenue. Retrieved from http://www.nextavenue.org/challenge-long-term-care/
SAMHSA staff. (2016). Strategic Initiatives. SAMHSA. Retrieved from http://www.samhsa.gov/about-us/strategic-initiatives
