Southern California already deals with issues that will get worse as people live longer and there’s a worker shortage. Can families fill all the gaps?
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in early 2020, about 4.5 million Americans were paid to work in eldercare, most at nursing homes, assisted-living facilities or as in-home aides.of those workers left the profession, a decline that made eldercare one of the country’s hardest-hit industries, at least in terms of pandemic-related job losses.Whatever the cause, the worker exodus helped spark a human and economic disaster.
But the professional side of eldercare is only a sliver of the actual work done taking care of older people. And it’s not growing anywhere near fast enough to keep pace with a self-explanatory trend that demographers call the aging boom, which is already well underway in the United States and in most other advanced economies.
First, within the broader aging boom, the fastest growing cohort is the oldest of the old, people 85 and up. America currently has about 7 million people in that age range;group, the number of Americans age 100 and older is forecast to grow from about 90,000 today toStatistically, these are the people most likely to need care. While just 1.1% of people ages 60 to 74 live in a nursing home, that shoots up to 15% when you’re talking about people 85 and older.
The report also found that while most caregivers say taking care of elders is “difficult but rewarding,” there are myriad downsides, ranging from lost income to frustration to depression. About 1 in 4 said caregiving has made their own health go downhill.“There’s no way every family can do this. No way,” said Lia Alvarez, a 58-year-old former librarian in Long Beach who left her job three years ago to care for her aging mother and her mother-in-law .
, or slightly more than the current population of Pennsylvania, according to federal data and studies by the national Alzheimer’s Association. In Southern California, the number of Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients figures to jump from about 710,000 today to about 1.5 million. A survey released last summer by the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living found that 3 in 5 nursing homes have limited new admissions because they don’t have enough workers. And the survey, which tracked 759 nursing home providers, found that 3 in 4 believe the lack of workers might eventually push them out of business.
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