Acting at home and in the community

Social health care for the elderly, as well as strictly health care, can be classified according to the area where it is provided, whether it is applied at home or in the community, that is, on an outpatient basis.

Regarding the social health care that is offered outside the residence of the elderly, there are day centers. These are a social health and family support service that provides help in these two components to elderly people with different degrees of physical or psychosocial disability so that they remain in their usual environment. They are preventive, rehabilitative and family support centers that alleviate the burden of caregivers of partially dependent people. This is done when the patient comes to the center for a few hours a day, during which rehabilitation and socialization activities are carried out and in the meantime the caregivers can carry out other tasks, enjoy a few moments of leisure or simply rest. There are day centers specialized in some disorders, such as day centers for patients with Alzheimer's disease, which care for the elderly with this pathology that conditions conduct disorders and psychosocial disabilities.

The social welfare centers are the offices, mostly dependent on the regional governments, where the information and management of the social and health aids offered by government agencies is centralized. Although they do not treat patients directly, it is essential to address them to obtain guidance in situations of dependency that require social support. On many occasions, patients or their caregivers are referred to them by health services upon detecting the need.

Regarding the social and health services offered at home, there are many varieties.

In the first place there is telecare, a telematic connection service through the telephone line that provides a health service and personal support to elderly people who live alone or who spend many hours without company and have limited financial resources. It allows solving situations in which immediate help is needed such as a health problem, a domestic breakdown, problems with medication, solving them from the call center or with intervention at home.

Family workers are professionals who go to the homes of older people with dependencies and social needs, who live alone, or with an insufficient support network, with few resources. These personnel collaborate in the basic tasks of caring for the patient such as mobilization or cleaning or in domestic tasks: shopping, meals ... It is a complement to the informal care of the family itself or volunteering. These professionals usually attend a few hours a day or a week, agreed according to the needs detected by the health and social team.

Other aids are the volunteering to accompany the elderly, both at home to socialize, as help for the transfer to medical consultations, documentation management, etc., as well as the services of "food on wheels", catering that offers already cooked dishes ( that only need to be heated in the microwave) to elderly people with problems to properly maintain adequate nutrition, both due to not being able to get food (going out to buy) and to cook them, and who live alone, without sufficient external support to help and control these older people.