Transformation: A Family's Guide to Chronic Care, Guided Care, and Hope

There's bad news... And there's good news... The bad news is that our nation is in serious trouble when it comes to providing health care to our seniors. * Over 77 million people from the post-war baby boom are headed into their retirement years. Along with that, comes declining health and often multiple chronic illnesses. * There are not nearly enough geriatric and primary care specialists to deal with this population. Making matters worse-it's too late to train more. * This population not only threatens to overwhelm our health care facilities, the current methods of treating people with multiple chronic conditions is heartlessly inefficient, and the cost is astronomical. The good news is that maybe there's a way out of this impending disaster. If we can't create enough properly trained specialists to meet the need, maybe we can magnify the impact of the ones we have. * Maybe we can devise a new model for treating people with multiple chronic conditions. * Maybe we can create a new breed of specially trained, lower cost, medical professionals to magnify the physician's impact. * Maybe we can find a way to increase the quality of care these seniors receive and, at the same time, reduce costs to the health care system. It not only can be done-it has been done. It's called Guided Care; and it might literally transform the way health care is delivered to our senior citizens. This isn't your standard "patient education" book. It's a story of discovery-and a story of hope.