Are senior citizens in rural areas getting all the services they need?
Seniors in Southside Virginia and in the Shenandoah Valley are receiving services less frequently than seniors in urban areas. That includes things like home meal delivery – services a new Government Accountability Office report says are available even if people don’t know about them.
That’s why the GAO is calling for better information sharing, an approach Shonel Sen at the University of Virginia says is a smart approach.
“In the age of social media, if we put out an ad for meals on wheels on Twitter, you can’t expect an 85 year old individual living in a senior care facility to be aware of it," Sen explains. "So we do need to have targeted outreach.”
Frank Shafroth at George Mason University says another factor contributing to the imbalance between urban and rural seniors is all that wide-open space.
“You get to more rural areas, and simply getting access to a doctor is hard. In parts of southern Virginia it can be a long drive," says Shafroth. "You have a lot of people who have disabilities, so they can’t drive themselves.”
The GAO says one way to fix the problem is to centralize information available from the Department of Health and Human Services, making it searchable across websites instead of scattered across the internet.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
