| Alzheimer’s disease(AD)is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that occurs in the elderly.With the aging of China’s population,the number of the elderly with AD is increasing as well.At present,there is no effective treatment for the disease,and specialized care is the main way to delay the progress of the disease,which poses high requirements on families and caretakers.Due to continual investment of human,physical,and financial resources,families with the elderly with AD are mostly under heavy burden and need strong support from the society.Community home-based care is a new elderly care model in between family-based and nursing-house-based care,which has been proposed in recent years.It is based on home care and supported by communities and nursing houses.As an ideal care model,it can not only meet the elderly’s desire of being cared at home,but also give full play to the community resources to solve their needs for basic old-age care and special medical care and other specialized services.Since2016,Chengdu Municipal Government has successively launched a series of community home-based elderly care policies;practically,the government procure services and specify service items for the entire elderly population.Therefore,the services tend to be homogenous,and fail to meet varied needs of different elderly groups.This study takes the elderly with AD as research subjects and conducts a questionnaire survey and data analysis on their needs for community home-based care services,the results of which suggest that this group of the elderly people represents a large demand for community home-based care services,especially those with no spouse or fewer children,with longer courses of disease or severer courses,and with more chronic complications.Moreover,as the disease progresses,the needs of these old people in living and medical services also change accordingly.In the early stage of the disease,they have a greater demand for medical treatment,including community consultations and rehabilitations,and relatively limited demand for living care;to the middle and late stages,they need living care more.In addition to normal living services,the demand for day care centers and dedicated nursing houses for the elderly with AD has also been increasing rapidly.In the face of the demand for community home-based care service for the elderly with AD,and by drawing experience from with the developed countries,in order to provide effective and efficient community home-based elderly care,an integrated community home-based care system needs to be established in the first place,which can make full use of information resources to set up information platforms,break the restrictions among different communities,and coordinate the planning of resources and fragmented services,so that the community home-based care could be accurately provided for the old with AD.Secondly,AD community intervention centers can be set up as extension to the medical care system and improve the hospital-community-family nursing system.With that,the elderly people with AD can enjoy convenience in seeking medical treatment and rehabilitation in nearby locations,thus laying a solid foundation for them to receive medical treatment,delay the development of their disease,and receive personalized community home care services.Thirdly,the government needs to make further efforts to develop a comprehensive service support system,provides more social support to the elderly and their families,and eases their psychological and economic pressure.Lastly,it is necessary to further clarify the role of community in the community home-based care system,especially to fully utilize the accurate matching between service subjects and service resources,in order to ensure the smooth operation of community home-based care from the aspects of elderly care request assessment,elderly care service supervision and management,and family support etc. |
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