Community-based healthcare

In recent years community-based healthcare has started becoming more important.This is because hospital stays are becoming much shorter. Clients are being discharged from hospital into community care much earlier than they were in the recent past. As our ability to deal with acute conditions, such as the trauma from road accidents improves, more people are surviving with impairments which need continuing care, usually provided in the community. In addition to this, an aging population means there has been a steady rise for some years in the number of people with chronic conditions who live in the community and are cared for in that same community (commonly referred to as “aging in place”). As the baby boomer generation moves into old age, the number of older people being cared for in their community is expected to rise dramatically. There is a pressing need to have a better understanding of community-based healthcare in its full complexity. In this chapter we draw attention to some of the factors that contribute towards that complexity and how health professionals can engage more fully with community based healthcare.