Programs for Assisted Living

Assisted Living Care Facilities

After examining the Argentum Expanded Senior Living website, it appears perfectly clear that the role of assisted living programs in America is to help furnish a living and a balance between autonomy and dependence, for many different people in this country. The vast majority of those people are the elderly. However, they also encompass people with both physical and mental disabilities, and those who cannot fully provide for themselves in general. Thus, assisted living programs are designed to aid people with the basic necessities that they need to have meaningful, fulfilling lives. It is worth nothing that these people are far from helpless. However, they still benefit from having people provide assistance to them for some of the mundane tasks that could potentially complicate their lives if they were to attempt to complete them all on their own. Therefore, there is the aforementioned delicate balance between the role of assisted living programs in offering aid and in actually empowering clients to live as they please, particularly in the wake of elder abuse which is not uncommon in the U.S. (Greenlee, 2016).

Assisted living is considered distinct from care issued in nursing homes and rehabilitation centers because assisted living patients generally need help with daily tasks. Those in the other two environments may have such needs temporarily because of some sort of medical condition. Assisted living residents typically need assistance for the long-term, which may or may not necessarily be related to any sort of health or rehabilitative issues. In some regards, then, the care administered in assistant living programs is easier than that issued in the other surroundings; other times, this situation may be reversed.

The principle reason that the assisted living is a growing field of health care today is that people are routinely living longer than they ever have before. In short, there are more old people than there previously have been. This trend is projected to continue due to advances in health care, medicine, and technology, which are keeping more people alive for longer they used to live.

Part Two

The main thing I could do to prepare myself for a career as administrator or CEO of an assisted living community is to gain experience in this particular aspect of health care. Initially, it is would be prudent to gain experience in any sort of health care field. However, in the aims of eventually pursuing an administration or CEO career in the field of assisted living, it would be advantageous to eventually get experience in this branch of healthcare. The most accessible way of doing would be to start out by volunteering in this field. Volunteer work is a viable means of gaining experience for one's resume, which is designed to "get the most important information out" (Hu, 2016). Specifically, I could find an assisted living community and inform its administration that I am a student at CSU who is studying healthcare and assisted living, in particular. Additionally, I could tell the administration that I hope to someday have a similar position to the person that I am speaking with, if not even something in upper level management. By explaining my education and my career goals, it seems that I should be able to obtain some basic entry level volunteer position so that I can come to understand the inner workings of assisted living administration and get a better idea of how to achieve and advanced position in this field.