LTC DECIDE: Introduction

Welcome to LTC DECIDE. This program was created to help people who are largely unfamiliar with the options and implications of long-term care services to make more thoughtful and more satisfying decision at a time of crisis and uncertainty. Most people have never faced such decisions before and are under great stress. It should provide information and structure to encourage you to consider as wide a range of options as possible.

This program is intended to help families make more deliberate and thoughtful decisions about this perplexing issue. It is not intended to answer all your questions about long-term care, but rather to give you a framework to work through the issues. It is designed to encourage all members of the family to participate in the discussion, especially the older person who is directly involved.

When people think about long-term care they tend to fixate on nursing homes. But there are many options available in most places. Making a good decision means understanding what those options are and what are the implications of each. Making decisions about what type of long-term care is best can be very hard. Many factors need to be considered. There are usually no RIGHT ANSWERS, just choices that are driven by preferences for achieving certain goals.

Before you can make a good decision, you need to be clear about what goals you want to maximize. Families need to be clear about what outcomes they want to maximize and where they are willing to compromise. For example, are they most concerned about safety or do they want a setting where the older person can have a lot of control about her daily life and activities. Often different family members have different opinions. It is helpful to get all these aired. Hopefully some level of consensus can be reached.

This program is designed to help you make these difficult decisions. It provides some information and a structure. It consists of five elements:

	An introduction to long-term care, which tells you a little about each type of long-term care
	A simple assessment of the older person’s needs that will generate expert opinions about which types of long-term care are best suited to her
	A simple test each family member can take to decide how much risk they feel comfortable with an older person taking
	An assessment each potential caregiver can take to decide whether they are able to take on this role
	Interviews with family people who have used various forms of long-term care.