What Exactly is Long-Term Care?
"...the care people need"

Long term care encompasses a variety of services that help people with chronic illnesses or other disabling conditions overcome limitations that keep them from being independent. It will not necessarily help to improve or correct medical problems, but it will help someone live with the condition they have. Long term care provides help with activities of daily living; bathing, dressing, toileting, continence, transferring, and eating.

Let's try to make this simple to understand. Activities of daily living are things that most of us do every day. What happens from the time you wake up?

Get out of bed or a chair-transferring

Use the facilities in the bathroom-toileting

Take a shower or bath-bathing

Put clothes on or off-dressing

Have a meal and get nourishment-eating

Control bowel and bladder movements-continence

If you need assistance or help with a couple of these for an extended period of time, you most likely would require long term care services. It is also possible that you could improve and no longer need these services.

Many of these services are support rather than medical services. Therefore, medical plans most likely do not cover them. Also, these are considered chronic conditions rather than acute. Acute conditions are short in duration and usually don't last more than 90 days.

Medical plans are based on acute care or your ability to recover quickly and move on with your life.

So, now you must realize that it doesn't take very much to need long term care services.

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