Elderly health care a serious state issue




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Elderly health care a serious state issue

La. official discusses alternative solutions

By Johanna Schindler
October 2, 2003

Louisiana hopes to soon offer more alternatives to nursing home care for its elderly residents, David Hood, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, told a group of concerned senior citizens at a luncheon Sept. 25.

Hood was the keynote speaker at the Citizens of Seniority Speak Out event sponsored by the Jefferson Concerned Citizens Inc. at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church 's Brown Tutt Memorial Building in Westwego.

In a recent study by the University of California , Hood said, Louisiana ranked 49th of the 50 states in the move toward community-based treatment programs for the elderly. There are 26,000 nursing homes and 500 community-based services in the state, he said.

There are about 7,000 empty nursing home beds statewide, and the occupancy rate for those facilities is about 77 percent, Hood said. His office, he said, "is bombarded with calls for minimal in-home care. Very rarely do we get a call from anyone who needs help getting into a nursing home."

Louisiana spent $225 million on nursing home care in 1989, and spends about $600 million a year on nursing home care today, yet the number of recipients of that care has been steadily declining, Hood said.

Louisiana has the second highest number of nursing home beds per thousand residents, Hood said. " Louisiana 's elderly are among the poorest and most vulnerable," he said. Twenty-four percent of Louisiana 's elderly live below the poverty level, he said; the national average is 12.8 percent.

"I don't want you to think we're at odds with nursing homes," Hood said. "We want quality nursing home care to be there when it's needed."

Hood shared his speaking platform with Ann Witmer of Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of New Orleans and executive director of PACE Louisiana , a community coalition of health and social service providers geared toward treating elderly patients closer to their homes.

Witmer explained that a community advisory board from Louisiana explored treatment options used in other states and decided upon PACE, Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly.

The first PACE center will be established in New Orleans ' Bywater neighborhood at the former St. Cecilia Catholic Church facility at Rampart and France streets, Witmer said. It is scheduled to open in the summer, she said.

A PACE center provides such services as adult day care where doctors, nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists and other health personnel work to treat the whole person, Witmer said. It also provides respite care one weekend per month to give caregivers a much-needed break, she said.

To illustrate how the PACE concept works, Witmer told the story of an older diabetic patient in South Carolina who suffered from recurring leg sores. The PACE staff would successfully treat the wounds each week, only to have the woman return the next week with the same problem, she said.

The PACE team researched the problem, and the transportation provider found its source. The sores were caused by flea bites from the woman's closest pal, her pet dog Skippy.

Because the dog provided the woman much-needed social support, the patient's care plan was altered to include regular flea dips for Skippy and extermination treatment for her home, Witmer said.

PACE care aims to meet "the needs of the whole person," Witmer explained. "It's a psycho-social perspective" to treatment, she said, which makes decisions "based on their whole lives. It acknowledges everyone's need for independence and dignity."

Witmer and others involved in the PACE project in New Orleans hope to soon organize a similar group of concerned citizens and health care providers on the West Bank to serve the needs of the older population, she said.

To be eligible for PACE care, Witmer said, a person must be 55 or older; meet the level of care criteria for a nursing home for assisted daily activities; must live in the area the PACE program serves; and must be able to be safely treated within the community.