New Institute of Medicine Report warns of impending health system crisis for older adults

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a new report that examines the health system capacity to serve the coming surge in older adults in the United States between now and 2030.  The report, "Retoooling For an Aging America: building the health care workforce," contends that the country is not prepared to meet the social and health care needs of this population.  It states that this growing older population will produce multiple challenges for the health care system, including:

- the majority of older adults suffer from at least one chronic condition;

- this population will become an increasingly larger user of total health care services, coming to use        more than 50 percent of all services, while rising to 20 percent of total population;

- the new generation of older adults will be more diverse than ever before creating different needs that previous generations;

- there is a dramatic shortage of health care workers to meet this growing service demand; and

- the existing health care workforce is not well trained to care for older adults

The IOM committee that produced this report calls for making improvements in three areas.  First, the report calls for enhancing the competence of the health care workforce to serve a geriatric population.  Second, it calls for increasing the recruitment and retention of geriatric specialists and caregivers.  Third, the report calls for improvement in the delivery of care to older adults.

According to John W. Rowe, former chairman and chief executive of health-insurance giant Aetna Inc. and chairman of the committee that wrote the report, "This could be seen as evidence that our society places little value on the expertise needed to care for vulnerable, frail, older Americans" (Source: "Report finds health work force Is unprepared for elderly boomers," The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2008).