Adult Foster Care "Best Kept Secret"

May 5, 2003
Foster care programs for chronically ill adults and elderly persons are a relatively small part of the long-term care picture but offer important social, personal and financial benefits that are getting a closer look as the budget pinch puts pressure on more common solutions.

The biggest benefit of adult family care is that it allows an elderly person to live in a home environment rather than a nursing home or other institution. Also, the cost of living with a "foster family" is typically about half that of nursing home care.

A pilot program in Arkansas puts elderly and disabled armed forces veterans in foster homes, at a total cost of about $87 per day, compared with $155 per day for a nursing home. Equally important, the program improves the quality of life for the veteran -- and often for the foster family as well.

"We take sick, depressed veterans from our (VA) wards and place them in a family environment where they become grandfather, uncle and father role models," said Thomas McClure, LCSW, who described the Arkansas program in testimony before a Senate subcommittee recently.

Several other states, including Arizona, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Texas, currently offer adult foster care for non-veterans. Care is typically provided by nurse practitioners and physicians assistants.

"It's the best-kept secret in long-term care," said Elsie Fetterman, PhD, who heads the National Adult Family Care Organization (NAFCO), in a recent Clinician News article.

"In nursing homes, people are treated like a piece of furniture -- they're not treated like human beings at all," Fetterman said. In family care, they wear their own clothes, eat what they want and can even have a pet in many cases.

"The residents feel they truly have a home but they don't have to worry about who's going to fix the roof," she said.