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Baby Boomer Health Care Crisis Looms; GSA Bolsters Call for Stronger Workforce |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: America's aging citizens are facing a health care workforce too small and unprepared to meet their needs, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) titled "Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce." The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the nation's largest organization devoted to aging research, fully supports the publication's call for a labor pool of adequate size and competency to care for a rapidly increasing over-65 population. "This pivotal report lays out a much-needed strategy for developing a network of health professionals and frontline workers to avert a crisis in quality care for older persons," said GSA President Lisa Gwyther, MSW. Committee Chair John W. Rowe, MD, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University and a former GSA president, said America must prepare itself for demographic changes. "And it's important to understand that older people themselves account for a disproportionate amount of the utilization of health care resources." Despite these trends, "the actual number of geriatricians is going down, not up, in the United States," Rowe added. Marie Bernard, MD, president of The Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (GSA's educational unit), said policymakers must act quickly to address these problems. "To meet the needs of our aging parents and grandparents, we need to increase the number of geriatric health specialists --- both to provide care for those older adults with the most complex issues and to train the rest of the workforce in the common medical problems of old age," Bernard said.
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