Summary: A startling study unveils a critical deficiency in the U.S. healthcare infrastructure: about 1 in 4 older Americans with dementia or cognitive impairments live solo, confronting increased hazards such as unsafe driving, medication mishaps, and overlooked medical appointments. This issue looms large, especially when juxtaposed against the backdrop of an aging demographic that’s set to grow exponentially.
The current health system seems ill-prepared to cater to these vulnerable seniors, particularly when benchmarked against systems in Europe, Japan, and Canada that provide comprehensive supports for such populations. As the U.S. grapples with these findings, the imperative for system enhancements becomes unmistakably clear.
Key Facts:
- An estimated 1 in 4 older Americans with cognitive decline lives alone, vulnerable to a range of risks including missed medical appointments and medication errors.
- The U.S. health system struggles to support this demographic, leaving many without proper care and interventions until they face serious crises.
- While regions like Europe, Japan, and Canada offer more extensive subsidized home care assistance, the U.S. largely does not, resulting in out-of-pocket expenses and inadequate support for these patients.
Source: UCSF
An estimated 1 in 4 older Americans with dementia or mild cognitive impairment lives alone and is at risk of practices like unsafe driving, wandering outside the home, mixing up medications and failing to attend medical appointments.
In a study publishing in JAMA Network Open on Aug. 18, 2023, researchers led by UC San Francisco concluded that the United States health system is poorly equipped to serve patients living solo with cognitive decline, a group whose numbers are predicted to swell as the population ages.
For these patients, living alone is a social determinant of health with an impact as profound as poverty, racism and low education, said first author Elena Portacolone, PhD, MBA, MPH, of the UCSF Institute for Health and Aging and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.
In this qualitative study, researchers interviewed 76 health care providers, including physicians, nurses, social workers, case workers, home care aides and others. Participants worked in memory clinics, home care services and social services and other places in California, Michigan and Texas
The providers raised concerns about patients missing medical appointments, failing to respond to follow-up phone calls from the doctor’s office and forgetting why appointments were made, leaving them vulnerable to falling off the radar. “We don’t necessarily have the staff to really try to reach out to them,” said a physician in one interview.
Discharging a patient is like ‘sending a kid out to play on freeway’
Some patients could not assist their doctor with missing information on their chart, leaving the providers uncertain about the pace of their patient’s decline. Many had no names listed as emergency contacts, “not a family member, not even a friend to rely on in case of a crisis,” according to a case manager.
These patients were at risk for untreated medical conditions, self-neglect, malnutrition and falls, according to the providers. A house service coordinator also noted that calls to Adult Protective Services were sometimes dismissed until a patient’s situation became very serious.
One consequence of the shaky infrastructure supporting these patients was that they were not identified until they were sent to a hospital following a crisis, like a fall or reaction to medication mismanagement.
Some were discharged without a support system in place. In one case, a patient was sent home with a taxi voucher, a situation that a psychiatrist likened to “sending a kid out to play on the freeway.”
These findings are an indictment of our health care system, which fails to provide subsidized home care aides for all but the lowest-income patients, said Portacolone.
“In the United States, an estimated 79% of people with cognitive decline have an income that is not low enough to make them eligible for Medicaid subsidized home care aides in long-term care,” she said, adding that the threshold for a person living alone in California is $20,121 per year.
While Medicare is available to adults over 65, subsidized aides are generally only provided after acute episodes, like hospitalizations, for fixed hours and for limited durations, she said.
“Most patients need to pay out-of-pocket and since cognitive impairment can last for decades, it is unsustainable for most people. Aides that are available via Medicaid are very poorly paid and usually receive limited training in caring for older adults with cognitive impairment,” she added.
Subsidized home care aides plentiful in Europe, Japan, Canada
In contrast, subsidized home care aides are generally available to a significantly larger percentage of their counterparts living in parts of Europe, Japan and Canada, said Portacolone, citing a 2021 review of 13 countries, of which she was the senior author.
The study’s findings illustrate substantial deficiencies in how our health system provides for people with dementia, said senior author Kenneth E. Covinsky, MD, MPH, of the UCSF Division of Geriatrics.
“In an era when Medicare is going to spend millions of dollars for newly approved drugs with very marginal benefits, we need to remember that Medicare and other payers refuse to pay far less money to provide necessary supports for vulnerable people with dementia.”
The researchers advocate for a system in which robust supports are made available by funding from an expanded Medicare and Medicaid. This will become increasingly critical, said Portacolone, “because effective treatments to reverse the course of cognitive impairment are unavailable, childlessness and divorce are common, and older adults are projected to live longer and often alone.”
About this aging and cognitive decline research news
Author: Suzanne Leigh
Source: UCSF
Contact: Suzanne Leigh – UCSF
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Perceptions of the Role of Living Alone in Providing Services to Patients With Cognitive Impairment” by Elena Portacolone et al. JAMA Network Open
Abstract
Perceptions of the Role of Living Alone in Providing Services to Patients With Cognitive Impairment
Importance
The potential role of living alone in either facilitating or hampering access to and use of services for older adults with cognitive impairment is largely unknown. Specifically, it is critical to understand directly from health care and social services professionals how living alone creates barriers to the access and use of supportive health care and social services for racially and ethnically diverse patients with cognitive impairment.
Objective
To identify the potential role of living alone in the access and use of health care and social services for diverse patients with cognitive impairment by investigating professionals’ perceptions of caring for such patients who live alone in comparison with counterparts living with others.
Design, Setting, and Participants
This qualitative study of 76 clinicians, social workers, and other professionals used semistructured interviews conducted between February 8, 2021, and June 8, 2022, with purposively sampled professionals providing services to diverse patients with cognitive impairment in Michigan, California, and Texas.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Clinicians, social workers, and other professionals compared serving patients with cognitive impairment and living alone vs counterparts living with others. An inductive content analysis was used to analyze the interview transcripts.
Results
A total of 76 professionals were interviewed (mean [SD] age, 49.3 [12.7] years); 59 were female (77.6%), 8 were Black or African American (11%), and 35 were White (46%). Participants included physicians, nurses, social workers, and home-care aides, for a total of 20 professions.
Participants elucidated specific factors that made serving older adults living alone with cognitive impairment more challenging than serving counterparts living with others (eg, lacking an advocate, incomplete medical history, requiring difficult interventions), as well as factors associated with increased concerns when caring for older adults living alone with cognitive impairment, such as isolation and a crisis-dominated health care system.
Participants also identified reasons for systematic unmet needs of older adults living alone with cognitive impairment for essential health care and social services, including policies limiting access and use to public home-care aides.
Conclusions and Relevance
In this qualitative study of professionals’ perspectives, findings suggest that living alone is a social determinant of health among patients with cognitive impairment owing to substantial barriers in access to services. Results raised considerable concerns about safety because the US health care system is not well equipped to address the unique needs of older adults living alone with cognitive impairment.
