The number of aging adults in the United States, the number of people who have crossed the threshold into elderly age, is growing every single year, particularly as the generation of Baby Boomers gets older and older. And as people age and grow older, many will need some level of retirement care at some point in their twilight years. Retirement care is a spectrum, to be sure. It ranges from those who need round the clock supervision in a nursing home care facility to those who choose to move to retirement communities but still live, for the most part, independently. But there’s no doubt about it – retirement care is a very necessary service provided to senior citizens, among whom seventy percent of those over the age of sixty five will require some form of, from more intensive forms of retirement care to the more hands off forms of retirement care. And with the average age of retirement currently at the age of sixty three, many older people will require retirement care and specialized care shortly after leaving the working world.
There are many cases in which moving to assisted living apartments can be hugely beneficial to both the elderly person moving there as well as to their family members. When family members and loved ones take over the care of an elderly person, particularly one who has been diagnosed with a type of dementia (most commonly Alzheimer’s disease, though there are, in total, more than one hundred different types of dementia altogether) or is in another way declining, the burden can be immense. Many family members ultimately must leave their jobs and abandon their current way of life in order to care of an elderly parent (or an elderly person of some other relation) and this can have a pronounced negative financial impact on the average person. In fact, this has become so prevalent that as much as fifty five percent of the elderly population of the United States greatly fears becoming a burden to their loved ones when they are no longer able to live on their own and take care of themselves. In such cases, moving into a nursing facility can improve the physical health as well as the mental health of everyone who is involved.
Moving to an assisted living home is also ideal for the person who is no longer able to perform the day to day tasks necessary for living alone. In fact, around forty percent – very nearly half – of the typical retirement care population receives help with as many as three daily tasks, and sometimes even more than that. On top of this, many more patients and residents will receive help with only one or two tasks, but still feel much safer while living in such an environment and with the aid, when necessary, of specialized caregivers.
There are even specialized memory care facilities for those who are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia. These people are likely to need higher levels of day to day care, and the vast majority of all memory care nursing homes have twenty four hour supervision, meaning that the residents are kept as safe as possible, as well as as happy and as engaged as is possible, a key factor in the life quality of a dementia patient that is just as important as having their physical needs met. With more than five million people in the United States alone now diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – and even more diagnosed with some other form of dementia – memory care facilities and the dementia treatment facility has become more necessary than ever before, providing the type of care and supervision on a daily basis that the typical family member, no matter how loving and how diligent, simply does not have the resources to be able to provide.
As much of the population of the U.S. begins to age, retirement care is likely to become more necessary than ever before. From minor retirement care to moving into a specialized car facility, such resources must be made available to all.
