The Assisted Living Federation of America (ALFA) has launched a new initiative aimed at identifying and addressing the major challenges impacting the senior living industry in the next 10 years.
Unveiled at the association’s annual conference in Tampa, Fla., the Senior Living 2025 campaign is designed to bring together industry stakeholders, listen to their concerns and develop principles to serve as a road map for addressing current and future issues.
“There’s an opportunity for us as an industry … to really be a critical part of the solution of what is going to be an impending retirement crisis,” ALFA CEO James Balda tells SHN. “We are a private-pay solution that can ultimately help solve what will be a huge challenge for this country in the coming years and that’s part of why we’re launching the Senior Living 2025 program — to really start to understand how the industry thinks things are going to look in 10 years, and to begin having a discussion around what we as an industry need to be doing to meet some of those challenges head on.”
As part of the new initiative, ALFA will lead a six-month “listening tour” around the country to learn more about the challenges facing industry stakeholders.
“In partnership with our state association partners we’re going to host listening events in conjunction with some of their conferences to hear from their members,” Balda says, noting that ALFA also wants to hear from regulators and other stakeholders outside the industry.
The tour will begin in New York, Wisconsin, Arizona and Kentucky. After gathering information during these tours, the association will “create a road map for what the next 10 years might look like,” Balda says.
“Everybody knows and talks about the shifting demographics, changes in the workforce, residents needing higher levels of care — but how do we really start to engage in a dialogue deeper than that on those issues and understand what stakeholders think the environment will look like in 10 years?” he says.
Written by Emily Study
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