By The Star Staff
Owners of senior care centers on the island warned of a “serious crisis” in their institutions after the Family Department announced a “halt” to a plan to care for more than 1,000 elderly people abandoned in hospitals and homes with an allocation of $5 million in funds not yet available.
Juanita Aponte, president of the Long-Term Care Center Owners Association, said categorically that senior care centers cannot finance food or medications, or even the burial of new patients who are taken to the institutions.
Aponte in a radio report urged the swift intervention of Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia so that the $5 million needed for the expansion of facilities and services for the elderly is delivered.
Puerto Rico is aging faster than most places on earth. Exacerbating the pattern is the exodus of more than 700,000 working-age Puerto Ricans — aged 20 to 64 — in the last 15 years, according to Amílcar Matos-Moreno, a post-doctoral researcher at Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute.
The U.S. territory is the first place, Matos-Moreno said, that is experiencing such rapid aging of its population because of recent migration.
Older adults who would traditionally rely on multigenerational family networks now find themselves alone with fewer or no close relatives and more dependent on caregivers and social service institutions. The biggest challenge is determining who navigates and coordinates essential services for aging Puerto Rico residents when they can’t advocate for themselves.
Mayra Ortiz Tapia, a clinical gerontologist, believes that “95% of families in Puerto Rico are dealing with this” right now.
Close to 741,000 Puerto Rico residents are 65 or older, according to U.S. census data. That’s roughly a quarter (22.7%) of the island’s total population, making its share of older adults the 10th highest in the world, Matos-Moreno said.
Nearly half of adults over 65 on the island (48%) had at least one adult child living outside of Puerto Rico in 2007.
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