2m elderly will have no adult child to provide care by 2030

Related articles

• Care needs to ‘outstrip’ family help
• Elderly care: ‘Who will care for me?’
• Breakdown of traditional family means two million over-40s will face old age alone
• Millions of pensioners face being left without care and spending final years in ‘chronic loneliness’
• UK should build ‘new community institutions’ for elderly

Empathic Urbanite

Wow. 2 million of us without carers! When I started this enterprise I knew that we were an ageing population and there’d be a lot of need for care in the future. But I hadn’t considered that there’d be so many childless people, which basically DOUBLES the number of people who will need paid care workers.

“By 2030, 230,000 people who need more than 20 hours of care a week will not have a relative to provide it, the think tank said.”

This is an IPPR report, so it’s solid evidence that our society, culture and especially government needs to start supporting care agencies and offering much better individual training and organisational opportunities if we are to meet this massive challenge. And don’t forget, when we talk about older people in the future, it’s not a report about some vague ‘other’, this time, we are talking about ourselves!

Three Sisters…

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Consensual Sex In Elderly Care Homes – Ageism And Safety Concerns

Regardless of what one thinks about sex outside marriage, this issue is certainly not going to go away in the near and far future as long as the elderly are institutionalized and/or live in residential care facilities.

From the 25 June 2012 Medical News Today article

An article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics reveals that elderly care home residents are often needlessly denied consensual sex because of concerns regarding safety and ageism. 

Researchers from the Australian Centre for Evidence Based Aged Care state that even though elderly people, including those with early stage dementia, often still enjoy a sexual relationship in their own homes, but once they move into residential care, a sexual relationship is often frowned upon.

The researchers say that factors, such as safety fears, insufficient privacy, concerns about duty of care, anxieties about potential repercussions from relatives, and ageism often take away people’s “basic human right”, standing in the way of “a normal and healthy part of ageing.” ….

Related articles

• Care home patients with dementia being ‘denied sex’ (independent.co.uk)
• Safety fears and agism denying care home residents right to consensual sex (eurekalert.org)
• Nursing Homes Aren’t Letting Old People Have Enough Sex [Aging] (jezebel.com)
• Care centers deny elderly the right to sex: medical journal (rawstory.com)
• Dementia patients’ desires left in the cold (abc.net.au)

Holiday Reunion With Elderly May Include ER Visit

 

Image via Wikipedia

From the 19 December 2011 Medical News Today article

…….Here are DeSilva’s five tips on how to tell if a senior relative needs immediate medical attention:

The person is unkempt with poor personal hygiene.

The home is very messy, dirty and has a foul odor.

Minimal movement by the person appears to be painful.

Mentally, the person is agitated or confused.

The person has not seen a physician in several months and is visibly unwell.

“Try to contact the primary-care physician first and alert them to the situation,” DeSilva said. But if holiday schedules or lack of information prevent that, bring them to the closest Emergency Department.

In the Emergency Department, you can expect the following:….