Long term care of AIDS patients

Abstract

Institutional long term care (LTC) can be important for AIDS patients because they frequently survive acute illness episodes yet remain severely incapacitated. Many of them are also homeless, or their families or friends are unwilling or unable to care for them. In three years of providing LTC for AIDS patients, staff at Coler Memorial Hospital in New York City have learned that accommodating the patients' fluctuating care needs is one of the program's greatest challenges. Some differences from other chronic care programs are the patients' needs for medically intensive services, their more frequent contagious infections, and their experimental drug regimens.