End-of-life care is a term used to define assistance and medical care in the late stages of people’s life. Elderly people frequently have one or more chronic illnesses and need intensive care in the days, weeks, and even months before they pass away. Essentially, the quality of life of the dying person and those who are important to them is attempted to be improved by effective end-of-life care. This is accomplished by identifying, assessing, and treating pain and other anxiety-related symptoms early on while also considering the patient’s psychological, social, and spiritual needs (Wolf et al., 2015). In this sense, society has to ensure that older people are comfortable in their late stages of life because many of them have chronic ailments.
The challenges that the aging population expansion imposes on the structure of civil society in terms of social, economic, physical, emotional, and health are significant. In spite of changes in their lives, health, or skills, older people desire to be able to remain in their homes and communities (Wolf et al., 2015). Aging in place is the term used to describe this. It is crucial to make elderly people like a part of the community in such situations. In order to facilitate aging in place, proper chronic disease treatment is necessary, given the high prevalence of chronic diseases among the senior population (Gonella et al., 2019). This is crucial because it helps older people stay secure in their homes by preventing health crises and delaying long-term problems.
In these situations, it is crucial to develop care systems that can deal with these problems and enable elderly people to live in their familiar surroundings for as long as possible. This can help to assess the capacity of the health system’s larger functions and processes to accommodate individuals’ varied requirements throughout their journey (Gonella et al., 2019). Moreover, it reflects its capacity to dynamically adapt as needs change is necessary for setting the goal of such adaptive health care (Bridges et al., 2019). Within these developments, it is possible to pinpoint systemic components that can hinder the clinician’s ability to respond.
For a system that wishes to be adaptable and personalized treatment to older people, especially those living with the complexity of chronic conditions and other health requirements, responsiveness is a highly essential health goal. Even if it might be difficult in practice to have access to older people’s specific experiences, it is vital to undertake impact analyses on responsiveness in the context of more general systemic changes (Gonella et al., 2019).
When discussing care for the elderly, using the concept of responsiveness as a conceptual framework highlights the diverse needs and expectations of service users, it allows to think about the constraints and potential for change in a healthcare system (Bridges et al., 2019). These areas can potentially shed light on the size of the transformational effort needed across the health system to consistently provide older patients with high-quality care while also identifying the precise institutional structures and procedures that can be changed to accomplish this crucial objective.
Responsiveness can be strong when service providers have the autonomy and resources to meet the needs and expectations of individuals while also being able to directly analyze those needs and expectations. In order to increase responsiveness in the setting of health care, organizational structures must be decentralized to some extent (Bridges et al., 2019). This will give best practices, and the management and organization of health care more discretion and independence. At the same time, it will benefit end-of-life care and its implications on society.
References
Bridges, J., Pope, C., & Braithwaite, J. (2019). Making health care responsive to the needs of older people. Age and Ageing, 48(6), 785-788. Web.
Gonella, S., Basso, I., De Marinis, M. G., Campagna, S., & Di Giulio, P. (2019). Good end-of-life care in the nursing home according to the family carers’ perspective: A systematic review of qualitative findings. Palliative medicine, 33(6), 589-606. Web.
Wolf, S. M., Berlinger, N. & Jennings, B. (2015). Forty years of work on end-of-life care—from patients’ rights to systematic reform. New England Journal of Medicine, 372(7), 678-682. Web.