Retooling for an Aging America

Download video file ^{(18.5MB, mp4)}

The baby boom generation is 78 million adults who begin to turn 65 in 2011. Unless we make changes now, we will not have enough doctors, nurses, and other caregivers prepared to meet the health needs of older Americans.

Americans today live longer and are healthier than previous generations, but older citizens still require more care and have more specialized needs than younger populations. As the number of older Americans increases, so will the demand for care.

Too few doctors and nurses are choosing to specialize in geriatrics; less than 1% of all doctors are geriatricians. Informal caregivers – that is, patients and their family members and friends – are often ill-prepared to handle the necessary treatments and specialized care that elders require.

To ensure that older Americans receive appropriate and high-quality care, the Institute of Medicine recommends the following steps in its report Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce:[1]

• First, instead of relying predominantly on specialists, we should work to enhance the competence of all individuals involved in the delivery of geriatric care.

• Second, at the same time, we need stronger incentives to recruit and retain geriatric specialists and caregivers.

• Finally, we need to apply more flexible models of care so that patients and those with lesser amounts of training can do more. For example, new home-based technologies offer an exciting prospect of enabling self-care by patients and other informal caregivers.

These changes in professional training, recruitment of geriatric specialists, and new models of care require action at many levels, including government payers, medical educators, and hospitals and clinical practices.

By retooling the health workforce, we can help assure that every American can look forward to a healthier future.

That's my opinion. I'm Dr. Harvey Fineberg, President of the Institute of Medicine.