The Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds today issued a report containing a number of recommendations for improving the care of the greatly increasing numbers of aged and chronically ill through community-wide coordination of medical and nursing resources.
The report, highly lauded by U.S. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry, is the result of an intensive four-year study sponsored by the Council’s Health Planning Committee, directed by Dr. Franz Goldmann, former professor of Public Health at Harvard and an international authority in the field. The Council’s research study was financed in part by the United States Public Health Service.
The report is designed to serve as a blueprint for local community action. Though based on studies made in Jewish hospitals, nursing homes and welfare agencies, it deals with problems common to all welfare councils, public health departments, community planning bodies and medical institutions.
One hundred and eighty-seven hospitals, special institutions for the long-term sick, homes for the aged, family service and vocational service agencies, and welfare federations under Jewish auspices cooperated in the research on which this report is based. Fifteen preliminary reports were issued at various stages in the study. The key recommendations of the final, published report are:
1. That the functions of general hospitals be expanded to include responsibility for acute hospital services for the chronic sick, for more cooperation between hospitals, long-term institutions and social agencies, and for the extension of hospital skills to chronic disease before, during and after hospitalization.
2. That the function of homes for the aged be converted into service for the long-term care of physically and mentally impaired adults, and that a variety of other community services must be developed for the care of the healthy aged.
3. That organized home care programs require vast expansion; that systematic plans for inter-agency and inter-professional cooperation be developed; and that new patterns of association with government, insurance organizations and commercial enterprises must be developed by voluntary, non-profit agencies and institutions.
Louis Stern of Newark, chairman of the Council’s Health Planning Committee, headed a group of 90 lay and professional representatives from communities throughout the country, many of them with wide experience in health planning. The report will be analyzed and discussed by member federations at a special session at the Council’s General Assembly to be held in Dallas, Texas November 16-19.
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