CONCLUSION

As America ages, healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals must rethink approaches to healthcare in general, since caring for the older population will soon take up a bigger portion of healthcare resources than caring for the health needs of the young. At the same time, there is a major deficit in adequately prepared healthcare professionals involved in providing geriatric care.

Healthcare professionals today must recognize that older people are a diverse group with different values, functional levels, and illnesses. They must begin to appreciate the need for improving and optimizing the older adult’s functioning rather than just focusing on diseases. This is, of course, challenging.

Effective management that engages older adults, family caregivers, and clinicians in collaboratively identifying the older adult patient’s needs and goals is necessary in order to implement an individualized care plan, while recognizing that health changes due to aging, together with multiple chronic illnesses, can make creating a personalized health strategy more complex.