Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fastidious | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of money is needed to create a better nursing home. Then finding the staff with "the call" to perform the very difficult job of caring and serving others.

Once that better nursing home is built, very few will be able to afford it. I know I will not. Yet, I do not lose hope.

View on HN

Some things are really easy and cheap.

Paint the zimmer frames red, for example.

One symptom of dementia illnesses is that your vision is affected; you stop seeing some things if they're the wrong colour. Red is the last colour to go, so you want all cups to be red on a contrasting colour table so that the person can see it and drink from it.

Having red zimmer frames means people see them and use them, reducing falls and increasing mobility. (Falls are really damaging for older people. It's kind of surprising how much life is shortened from a simple fall.)

Apologies for .doc

http://www.bcf.nhs.uk/docs/14053_1922582528.doc

To save everyone else the googling: Zimmer Frame = Walker

According to the article, it appears that the better nursing home advocated costs more to build, but doesn't cost more to run. Capital is usually easier to get from donors and the government than operating expenses; capital lets you put your name on the building and get your picture in the paper. That makes me slightly optimistic.

This problem is too extense to be solved only by philantropy.

IMO nursing homes problem will be solved as other expensive activities have been solved (or patched): relocation and offshoring.

How much does cost a low-end nursing home in the US? In South Europe $2k can get you a mid-end nursing home.

Plus automation and computers, perhaps.

People are not cattle but for sure there are plenty of room for automation improvement.

Even eg just putting seniors on videochat with some `penpals' might help some.

I can't quite tell if you are being satirical, but some folks wouldn't be okay with having their parents live in Ecuador and never seeing them.

But okay with them in Utah or some other state far away? You can just got to Columbia once a year as you fly once a year to Utah. Plus the whether is better.

I didn't see any mention in the article of putting family in far-away states. My family (who'd moved south of Boston) put my great-grandmother in a home in Connecticut, near where she had lived.

Is it common practice to do this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com