About the SeniorAdvisor.com 2014 In-Home Innovation Scholarship: We started the scholarship program to bring awareness of the unique benefits and challenges of in-home caregiving for seniors to younger generations. The questions posed by the scholarship encouraged our nation’s future caregivers to present solutions for improving home care in the United States. College-aged students were required to answer one of the three essay topics below and provide a short bio as part of their scholarship application. Read the winning essays here.
How can your major of study improve the lives of seniors receiving in-home care services?
Essay response by Deontae Hardnett
Being a statistician is beneficial to this particular industry because I can use my analysis to seek out the best solutions when it comes to helping out senior citizens. As I mentioned above, I have worked with senior citizens, so I would be able to add more to the health industry than just mere numbers. Getting back to the numerical purposes, statistics would also be able to give clues on what senior citizens could do to live longer. They can also give the odds of a person living longer based on certain health conditions and habits. How to treat those certain health conditions would be left to the doctors to implement.
Another way that statistics can be a productive force in the in-home care industry is that they would be able to tell if the senior citizens are satisfied with where/how they are living. This is critical simply because bad reports on a retirement home can raise red flags for most senior citizens. In order to make this happen, if it isn’t already happening, senior citizens would take surveys on the retirement homes. One of the major components that would be measured would be the immediacy of service (which would be according to the senior citizens’ approximation). If the times are too slow, then health inspectors shall be sent up there (again, if there already aren’t any health inspectors working there). Another component that would be measured is the money spent on utilities and medicine. It is very important for the nursing homes to spend an adequate amount of money on medicine because increased risks for health problems come along with increased age. One more thing that could be measured is the amount of times family members are allowed to visit. I know that I would be super depressed if my family wasn’t allowed to come and visit me. Antidepressants wouldn’t even be able to start family members from coming to visit, let alone come and visit me. Statistics can measure a lot of things, but it cannot measure depression. There would be graphs containing these ratings from the senior citizens. Those ratings would then be used to determine what improvements need to be made. I know, however, from working with senior citizens, that most of them liked having close relationships to the people that were helping them out; rather they were nurses or volunteers. Most of them were pretty nice, but there were some mean ones to look after. Also, if the numbers were to tell someone that a retirement were doing a good job, it would now be on health inspectors to not just take note of the conditions but to also take note of the vibe that is in a retirement home. If the health inspectors were to come back from a retirement with good reports but a bad vibe, then there would have to be some additional questioning going on to try and fix the problems.
I am a big numbers guy, but however numbers cannot tell everything. What they can tell though is how well, on average, it is living in a certain retirement home.
About Deontae
Deontae is working on a Bachelor of Science degree is to become an NBA statistician.
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