Elly Kleinman Americare

The Health of Older Citizens

The health of older citizens has become a critical policy during this century. As the number of older population keeps on increasing on a global level, most countries haven’t been able to meet the challenge and provide good quality healthcare for older citizens and their families. Elly Kleinman, the founder and current president of Americare, an organization that provides home healthcare services has been in the business for a long time, and has managed to build a successful career within the healthcare industry. As he explains, newer generations of older citizens have longer life expectancy, live healthier, they are better educated, and they and more demanding in terms of their quality of life. Today's older citizens are faced with new challenges, physical and psychological, challenges which their parents never faced. They live much longer and enjoy longer retirement, but they also have more concerns for a longer life in retirement and old age. Mr. Kleinman believes that these changes in older people’s life expectancy will affect the relations in the basic social institutions such as families, businesses, church and politics.

In the past, workers from the field of social welfare were less focused on older people simply because there were far less in number, and at the same time families were bigger, meaning they were able to provide most of them with the necessary care. Although nowadays there are much more old people whose needs for care are getting increasingly more difficult to met, only a small percentage of them will require all forms of care. Elly Kleinman's Americare has been providing all kinds of healthcare services to older people for almost thirty years. In order for the existing healthcare services to be effective, it is necessary to know how age changes people’s needs. Numerous studies have shown a fairly similar picture of today’s aging population.

It is a well known fact that more than 80% of the people over the age of 65 years suffer from some kind of chronic disease or a more serious condition. About a quarter of the elderly are limited in performing their daily activities, and about 15% of the elderly can’t perform most daily activities on their own. This means that about 85% of the older population managed to preserve their health and is either totally or mostly capable of independently taking care in their daily life. About 6% of the people over 65 years and 20% of those older than 80 years are suffering from some kind of mental illness. This means that in the oldest age group, four out of five people have completely preserved mental abilities. Still, Elly Kleinman Americare states that although some older people have major health problems, most of them are in relatively good health state, both physical and mental.