The Overlooked Professionals Keeping Senior Care Facilities Strong and Secure

Senior care is an important, if unglamorous, aspect of the healthcare system. Aging adults often experience a sad truism: out of sight, out of mind. Their needs are difficult to meet and involve the concerted effort of multiple professionals.

Often, this happens behind closed doors, sometimes at the home, or often in assisted living facilities. Family members want to provide the best possible care for their aging loved ones but often have to rely on services from strangers to make it happen.

Senior care professionals who are responsible for facilitating happy and productive lives for aging adults work tirelessly toward what often amounts to only modest progress.

Who are these healthcare heroes? In this article, we take a look at important and often underappreciated healthcare workers who make senior care possible.

First, What Do You Mean By Senior Care?

Not every adult experiencing gerontology services is sick, at least in a life-threatening way. The basic criterion is that they've reached the stage of life where improvement is no longer the goal.

They'll develop physical aches and pains, quite possibly mental deterioration. The professionals responsible for treating them are not focused on eliminating these conditions, because to do so would often be impossible. They're there to manage them.

The goal is to help the patient live the most fulfilling life available to them.

What does this look like in practice? Well, it could be as simple as preserving their most basic functions. This is a scenario in which bathing oneself or even getting to the bathroom with minor assistance is considered a big win.

In the relatively small world of at-home care, this involves teams of professionals regularly visiting the patients where they live, sometimes providing around-the-clock support to allow them to live with as much independence as possible.

These circumstances are fairly uncommon because they are extremely cost-prohibitive and very rarely covered by insurance.

For the vast majority of people who cannot afford around-the-clock at-home care, assisted living facilities become necessary. In these settings, it's obviously less likely that the patient will live a significantly autonomous existence, but they still have the opportunity for some level of personal freedom. This is thanks to the efforts of caring and passionate professionals.

Who Provides This Support?

Now that you have a rough idea of what senior care looks like, it's important to understand who is making this possible. In the next few headings, we will take a look at the healthcare heroes who are responsible for helping aging adults live their best lives.

Gerontology Nurses

We mentioned a little bit ago that gerontology is a category of healthcare reserved for people who are not eligible for traditional improvement. It's a bit of a vague category because the transition isn't necessarily immediately apparent.

Most patients are over the age of 65, and sometimes quite a bit older. As long as a person is still healthy and independent, they still qualify for traditional preventative care. Typically, this will mean seeing the same general practitioner that they've been going to as a younger adult.

At a certain point, as their needs begin to change, they might begin receiving support from more specialized caregivers, perhaps most particularly gerontology nurses. Gerontology specialists typically have an advanced practice certification.

Advanced practice certification means these nurses have gone back to school for additional training beyond their basic nursing degree, usually involving a master's program focused specifically on aging adults. In gerontology care, this extra education allows them to handle the complex medical situations that older patients often face, and they're able to coordinate all the different aspects of care that an elderly person might need.

Again, it's important to understand that this is not hospice care. The patients are not dying, and while it's pretty typical to enter gerontology care in the last two to three years of your life, there is no specific time limit. Someone could live a relatively happy and comfortable existence under these services for ten or more years.

The goal again is to provide as much comfort and autonomy as possible for people with difficult-to-manage chronic health conditions.

Administrators

One of the jobs for healthcare administrative degree holders could include helping to run an assisted living facility.

Administrators are the unsung heroes of the healthcare landscape. They produce the policies and procedures that help healthcare organizations run smoothly. They may never interact directly with a patient, but they make choices that influence hundreds or even thousands of lives throughout the course of their careers.

In the context of in-home or assisted living facilities, this will involve designing programs that are optimized to produce the highest possible level of comfort and personal fulfillment. This will include decisions that are directly care-related, but it might also involve developing social programs or even classes that keep the aging adults stimulated.

In these assisted living environments, the patient is completely at the mercy of the people caring for them. They are unable to facilitate most of their own experiences, which means they only have what they are given. That is an enormous responsibility that healthcare professionals on both the patient care end and the administrative end of the spectrum take very seriously.

Risk Analysts

Risk analysts are a less typical but still sometimes important component of the senior care process. They are typically brought into situations where security is the primary goal. For senior care clinics, this has multiple meanings, and the risk analyst job description might fluctuate to reflect that.

For one thing, assisted living homes themselves need to be well organized to ensure that patients do not wander off or encounter obstacles that would otherwise be prohibitive because of their condition. This alone is an important factor that requires a significant amount of planning and consideration.

Security risk analysts can also play a bigger role in identifying cybersecurity issues and other indirect but still impactful risks that could threaten the well-being of aging adults.

If you're interested in contributing to senior care, there are so many different ways to do it. It's all about finding the one that interests you the most.