Long-term care

Abstract

Long-term care (LTC) expenditures have continued to increase, with the bulk of public LTC expenditures continuing to go toward nursing home care. Recently, however, there has been a move toward greater diversification of LTC, in spectrum of both clientele and care modality, with a concomitant change in the nature and role of the nursing home as the touchstone of LTC. Long-term care has come to include both an acute component (sometimes called "subacute care" or "postacute care"), which effectively provides the care formerly offered in hospitals, and the more traditional chronic component, which includes both medical and social services. As the name implies, subacute care has a shorter time frame and serves patients who are expected to recuperate or die, while the more chronic form provides more sustained supportive services. Specific phenomena include invigorated postacute care, socially oriented approaches to meeting chronic LTC needs at home or in residential settings,