Prime Time - Jane Fonda [128]
We deserve comprehensive coverage for palliative care.
Access to quality palliative care should be universal.
A Nursing-Care Crisis
According to Dr. Robert Butler, the author of The Longevity Revolution: The Benefits and Challenges of Living a Long Life, our country is facing a nursing-care crisis. Workers in long-term-care facilities are poorly trained and poorly paid, and often leave due to lack of appreciation and/or lack of opportunity for advancement. Care workers are not uniformly required to hold certification, and many are paid merely $8 an hour, with no health benefits. Only one in ten nursing homes meets basic federal standards in the United States. This problem cannot and should not be minimized. It is nothing less than a sign of ageism that we have 1.5 million people in nursing homes, but only 10 percent of those homes meet federal standards.
Nursing homes need properly trained, properly paid caretakers who are rewarded for their hard work. Caretakers need opportunities for raises, continuing education, and career advancement. To address this issue, an ongoing grant initiated by the International Longevity Center allows care workers to take classes at twenty-four community colleges in multiple geographical locations as an opportunity to move ahead in the field of nursing. The purpose of the program is to allow care workers, who are often big-hearted but disenfranchised, to move toward a career that provides them with greater security and dignity. Many are not paid even minimum wage.
We deserve properly paid, properly trained care workers.
We deserve long-term-care facilities that uniformly meet federal guidelines.
Lost Opportunities in Research
We are losing ground in scientific research and medical training. Dr. Robert Butler has stated that although the United States is usually at the forefront of medical and scientific research, we now fall behind other countries in terms of the percentage of gross domestic product allocated for science. Over recent years there has been a 13 percent cut in science funding. This limits scientists’ ability to get grants, and many fine young PhDs who were trained in the United States are returning to their home countries.
We deserve to see the world’s most advanced research programs on aging take place in the United States.
Furthermore, medical training in geriatrics is inadequate in our country. Only a fraction of our 150 medical schools have specific training programs in geriatrics. Medical students are sometimes offered elective courses on the needs of older patients, but these classes are pursued by only a small percentage of students. Worse yet, clinical medication trials rarely include older patients (the FDA does not require that the elderly be included in medication trials), even though older people use 40 percent of all the medications available.
We deserve strong geriatric medicine programs in all of our nation’s medical schools.
We deserve inclusion in medication trials.
Research on aging goes beyond the disciplines of biology and medicine. Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, believes that quality-of-life advancements require cross-disciplinary efforts. Social scientists need to continue to examine which factors contribute to health in old age, and psychologists should design campaigns for social change. City planners should assess what is necessary to help older people maintain active daily lives, with less time spent being sedentary. These are broad goals—but they are not impossible. A wider view of life-span wellness is required across all sectors of society. To make a true breakthrough in “longevity science,” a multitude of academics and professionals will need to dismiss the disease focus that currently defines old age.
We deserve more research on healthy living across the life span.
A Revolution!
Some people think we are asking for a lot. Well, people at the forefront of revolutions do that. As we move toward unprecedented