With the number of elderly persons needing long-term care expected to double to 14 million over the next two decades, assisted living has become the popular choice for housing or care. Assisted living represents a promising model of long-term care that blurs the sharp distinction between nursing homes and community-based care and reduces the gap between receiving long-term care in one's own home and in an institution.
Assisted Living: Needs, Practices, and Policies in Residential Care for the Elderly examines the evolving field of residential care and focuses on national issues of regulation, reimbursement, and staffing. The book is based on a four-state study of assisted living facilities and describes the facilities, the persons residing in them and their needs, and how the services vary by facility. Because one-third to two-thirds of residents in assisted living facilities have cognitive impairment, special attention is devoted to dementia care. The book also focuses on how today's long-term health care environment evolved, and it examines the future direction and implications of assisted living.
Assisted Living: Needs, Practices, and Policies in Residential Care for the Elderly brings together a group of nationally recognized experts to help define the types of residential care that should be encouraged and sets guidelines for selecting an appropriate type of facility.
About the Author: Sheryl Zimmerman, Ph.D., is an associate professor, School of Social Work, and co-director and senior research fellow of the Program on Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Care at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; she has conducted numerous research projects directly studying nearly ten thousand residents of long-term care settings and has published widely. Philip D. Sloane, M.D., M.P.H., a geriatrician with broad clinical background in long-term care, is Elizabeth and Oscar Goodwin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of the text Dementia Units in Long-Term Care. J. Kevin Eckert, Ph.D., widely recognized as a leading expert on board and care, is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, as well as a co-author of the text Small Board-and-Care Homes: Residential Care in Transition.
