Senior Care: Your Guide To The Care Continuum

What is a SNF, ALF…!?!

Navigating the complex continuum of senior care settings can be challenging. Complicating things further are the many acronyms those in the industry throw around like ALF, SNF…etc. This short and simple guide hopes to clear up some of the confusion.

For the visual learnings, lets start with a graphic display of the complete continuum:

Senior care is delivered in a wide range of settings, including acute care, ambulatory care and post-acute care facilities and in patients’ homes. After receiving treatment in an acute care or ambulatory care facility, seniors are often discharged to lower cost, post-acute care settings for further treatment. Generally, these post-acute care settings, listed in decreasing order of patient acuity and cost, include skilled nursing facilities, or SNFs, senior living facilities (such as assisted living facilities, or ALFs, independent living facilities, or ILFs, and continuing care retirement communities, or CCRCs) and the patient’s home (where in-home care services such as home health care, hospice care, private duty care or informal care are delivered).

With that said, there are always caveats to keep in mind. For instance, in some geographies there are not the clear distinctions between facility types. As an example, in the U.K. the facility types tend to blend together (a product of regulatory differences in care). Furthermore, you will often see multiple facility types hosted under a single roof.

There are also things like country specific health programs to consider. In the U.S. for example, you may hear about Medicare PACE programs. PACE stands for Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly. Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) is a Medicare and Medicaid program that helps people meet their health care needs in the community instead of going to a nursing home or other care facility. However, we will leave this discussion for another day!