Introducing an Internationally Recognized Person Centered, Community Integrated Model of Home Care

Home care is one of the furthest points along the chain of care that you can get for the older adult. It occupies critical space in the care continuum, dominating large parts of the person’s space and time. The home is especially relevant to aging in place dynamics and the highly important dimensions of the mind and community interaction.

Mosaic’s blue print for Person Centered Care extends the notion that home care based services should be implemented collaboratively with the individual and their families to one that also embraces the voice and the rich habitat of the mind and the being of the person.

It is one that is also especially sensitive to the importance of community and the person’s place in the community. In this sense the model is one that delivers personal support and medical care along well defined client centered protocols differentiated by a fluid organic relationship core. Not only is the client front and center in the relationship but the care provider itself develops a wider set of integrated relationships with the community.

At a fundamental level, the person centered intervention begins a conversational framework that becomes an interactive journey between all those involved in the care relationship. It differs from other similarly framed interventions paying attention to, as Daniel Kahneman would say, the remembering self and the experiencing self: to remember, to create to positive experience.  The framework is sensitive to the need for creative space and loop backs to the person’s mental and physical interests and community interaction.

Much of the inspiration for the development of the model came from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, A Better Life-What Older People with High Support Needs Value (Jeanne Katz et al, 2011).

The talk will discuss how the service model is framed and delivered, how it interacts with the person being cared for and the supports, services and exigencies of wider community engagement. As the growing literature confirms, a failure to embrace the many inputs that impact both physical and mental well being is costly for society as a whole and, at times, devastating for the individual.

Two immediate public policy implications arise from our model. The first is that it is designed to be delivered as a cost effective, stand alone, component at a “global system level”, which means that serving the higher level dimensions of personhood could become a standard component of public sector healthcare delivery. The second relates to the design of an interface between for profit and not for profit elements and activities within the community and the person in care to facilitate resource efficient “integration”; this we believe is critical to the evolution of an integrated community and the ability to age “fully” in place.