Innisfail-Sylvan Lake MLA Kerry Towle is calling for more home care to deal with a huge increase in the seniors population in Alberta, expected over the next 10 years or so.
Towle made that call during an appearance before Bowden town council this past week. She's the Wildrose Official Opposition Critic for Human Services and Seniors.
“We get 120 hours of home care a year in all of Central Alberta,” Towle said. “That is 10 hours a month. You cannot take care of your loved ones at home 10 hours a month.”
Towle said due to a shortage of beds, especially for senior care, elderly Albertans and others with chronic or long-term illnesses end up being transferred to facilities well outside Bowden and other smaller communities where they've lived for years – maybe their whole lives.
She said in theory, there are 12,400 to 12,500 long-term care beds; however, about 1,300 of them have been closed. Towle said that has a “devastating” effect on residents of small Central Alberta communities.
“It means residents from Bowden are being transferred to Rocky, Ponoka, Stettler,” she said. “These are outside of our trading corridor. It is highly unlikely that people from our community are doing business, or family or such, in Rocky. What it means is typically, one of the partners is home, the second partner gets transferred out, and it's almost impossible to get the transfer back.
“So we're having couples who have been together for 60, 70 years who have never been separated either dying alone and apart and not in their communities – away from friends and family – which is a huge issue.
“We're not saying don't build any more beds, but we're saying the current process of forcing everyone into cities and facilities is not a solution either because it is bottling up acute care,” Towle said.
“Right now what happens without adequate home care a crisis happens in the home, the ambulance is called, (the patient is) taken to acute care where they languish for four to six months, and they sit there, waiting to be put on a continuing care placement list and you're sent up to 100 kilometres away, and hopefully you can find a way to get back,” she added.
Towle said about one in every 100 Albertans is over 65 and that number is expected to increase.
Not only that, but she says people who have diseases like ALS and Parkinson's tend to age and get Alzheimer's (disease) and dementia a lot faster than those who don't suffer from those diseases.
As a result, she says, “we will never have enough beds and study after study has shown that most people are most benefitted by being cared for in their home in the safest communities possible – the community that they know and have grown to love.”
In addition, she said, home care staff get to know their patients well and can spot issues like isolation, depression, abuse, and people who haven't been taking their medication earlier than other care staff.
“It can also start to open the door to conversations with friends and family to say ‘I think your loved one is at the beginning stages of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's' or ‘I think we're heading into the stages where it's no longer safe for your loved one to be at home,'” she said.
