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Abstract
One of the first descriptions of nursing of people with intellectual disability (ID) is from the United States at the New York Hospital around 1808. Over the next 200 years ID nursing has developed into a subspecialty in both the United States and England with a curriculum and certification. This process has yet to take place in Israel, but it is a change we would like to see in the coming years. The purpose of this paper was to look at the trend in the number of nursing patients in residential care centers for people with intellectual disability in Israel. Data was extracted from the 1998-2009 national annual surveys of all residential care centers in Israel. Over this period, we found that the number of nursing patients had been fairly constant, ranging from 23.9% of the total population in 1998 to 24.6% in 2009. While the percent of nursing patients has remained steady, the burden of nursing has increased. Specifically, due to the aging of this population, residential care centers are now dealing with an increased quantity and complexity of medical problems. As a result, we have experienced a need to establish, on a regional basis, long-term nursing care facilities within our residential care centers.
Keywords: Residential care, mental retardation, intellectual disability, long-term-care, nursing, Israel
Introduction
Life expectency has increased for people with intellectual disability and especially for persons with Down syndrome, where the mean age at death was 9 years in the 1920s and now in fact around 60 years (1). This increase in lifespan can be seen as the consequence of progress in medical technology and improved social awareness in the twentieth century. In the past, most individuals with intellectual disability died at a young age due to their additional medical problems, congenital malformations and infections; as a result, very few went through the aging process.
Mental retardation or intellectual disability as it is now the common term used today has since 1908 (2) been defined and re-defined multiple times by the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disability (AAIDD, formerly AAMR, founded in 1876). The most recent revision (the eleventh) took place in 2010 (2), in which mental retardation/intellectual disability is defined as a disability charaterizedcharacterized by significant limitations both...