Long-term care (LTC) is a variety of services which help meet both the medical and non-medical needs of people with a chronic illness or disability who cannot care for themselves for long periods. Long term care is focused on individualized and coordinated services that promote independence, maximize patients' quality of life, and meet patients' needs over a period of time.
It is common for long-term care to provide custodial and non-skilled care, such as assisting with normal daily tasks like dressing, bathing, eating, and using the bathroom. Increasingly, long-term care involves providing a level of medical care that requires the expertise of skilled practitioners to address the multiple chronic conditions associated with older populations. A chronic illness may be due to a physical or a severe cognitive impairment like dementia.
A severe cognitive impairment is a loss or deterioration in intellectual capacity or judgement which requires substantial supervision to protect a person and is measurable by clinical evidence and standardized tests that reliably evaluate short and long term memory, orientation as to person, place, or time, deductive or abstract reasoning, and judgement as it relates to safety awareness.
