hough voters had voted to create a department of elder affairs prior to the Chiles/MacKay team taking office, their wishes had been ignored. To keep faith with the people, Chiles/MacKay made the creation of the Department of Elder Affairs a top priority. The department's key focus has been to help elders remain at home rather than be placed in institutional settings such as nursing homes or assisted living facilities.

Community Care for the Elderly (CCE) keeps elders in their homes and communities and has grown during the 1990s, serving 40,000 clients in 1998 — virtually all of whom would have been in institutions without this program. Under Chiles/MacKay, Florida had one of the lowest rates of elders living in nursing homes of any state, with the nursing home population just a little more than half the national average. Chiles/MacKay worked to shift some of the burden of the costs of the CCE program away from Florida taxpayers by using a variant of the Medicaid program, which uses federal dollars for 55 percent of costs. Without the initiative, taxpayers would have faced tens of millions of dollars in additional costs- or elders would have gone without services. Instead, the number of clients served increased from 6,800 clients in 1992 to 11,300 in 1998.

Because of the low nursing home population, families, not public programs, provide most of the elder care in Florida. Recognizing there are times when families caring for elder members in their homes need assistance, the Chiles/MacKay administration sought to provide support to caregivers. For example, respite services for the caregivers of those with Alzheimer's more than tripled between 1992 and 1998, rising from 1,600 clients served to 3,800 clients served in 1998.

Under an agreement with the Department of Health, Elder Affairs and its partner foundation, the Elder Floridians Foundation, launched the largest state-supported free screening program for osteoporosis in the nation. The program provided free bone scans to more than 4,000 Floridians.