Phone service ‘saves lives,’ but funding is scarce

One night in early January 2017, a 91-year-old woman living alone in her L’Isle-Verte apartment felt a pang of weakness and collapsed to her kitchen floor.

The woman, who had significant health issues, managed to drag herself to her living room, but couldn’t muster the strength to reach her phone to call for help.

She spent the night there, on the floor and in distress, unable to get to her feet. At exactly 9:30 a.m. the next morning, her phone starting ringing. She couldn’t answer it. Ten minutes later, it rang again. Then again.

Within moments of the third call, a neighbour with a key to her apartment rushed in to help. He kept her company until an ambulance arrived.

Like roughly 6,000 other isolated seniors in Quebec, the woman subscribed to the Pair Program: an automated system that calls each day to ensure they’re safe. After three unanswered rings, an emergency contact is called and asked to head over.

After a recent coroner’s report detailed how a 72-year-old, socially isolated man was found two months after his death in Montreal, the people behind the program are repeating the importance of spreading its reach in Quebec.

“It saves lives,” said Yves Cournoyer, vice-president of Somum Solutions, the company behind the system. “The problem is, it’s not well-known and the funding isn’t there yet.”

In a first last month, Quebec’s ministry of health and social services announced $300,000 in funding for a new centre that will oversee the program’s development across the province.

For now, the service is offered by different agencies in Quebec — police forces, municipalities or community and volunteer organizations — who pay for it, then offer it free to seniors in their communities.

But receiving little in government funding through the years, Cournoyer said, has stumped its growth. Quebec’s Secrétariat aux aînés cut funding in 2015 for a users’ committee that oversaw the program, and the committee disbanded last year.

The new centre, launched in its place, will now look to standardize the service provincewide and help it reach more people.

Cournoyer estimates it would take about $2.5 million a year to offer the service to everyone who wants it in Quebec. But he’s optimistic the recent provincial investment is a first step in the right direction.

Each day, he said, he receives 10 to 15 calls from people wanting to sign up in areas the service isn’t available, including in the greater Montreal region. Hearing how alone and isolated some are can be difficult, he said.

Earlier this month, a Pointe-aux-Trembles woman called to ask about the program. She wasn’t necessarily concerned about her own health — her worry was dying without anyone noticing in time to come save her cat.

Last year, a Quebec coroner recommended that all municipal housing offices in Quebec with elderly tenants offer and promote the Pair Program in their buildings, to “considerably reduce the number of people who die alone in their apartment.”

Coroner Raynald Gauthier’s recommendations came in a report on the death of 65-yearold Francine Pratte, who was found in her fifth-floor apartment a month after dying.

Socially isolated, Pratte lived alone in a building run by Trois-Rivières’ municipal housing office. Her family rarely visited; her son called about once a month. The building ’s janitor, who didn’t know Pratte, found her after a neighbour complained about a rotten smell coming from her apartment.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Gauthier wrote, “to see that elderly people, socially isolated and living in municipal housing units, can die and be unheard from for so long before anyone becomes concerned.”

But the coroner’s recommendation hasn’t had the impact some had hoped for.

Suzanne Girard, director of the Association des proches aidants de la Capitale-Nationale, which runs the Pair Program in the Quebec City area, said it has had little to no effect.

“Doors are still closed,” Girard said. “We can’t get the program into homes and we don’t understand why.”

Though the recent funding is encouraging, Girard said she believes the service needs to be supported and officially promoted by the provincial government to ensure it reaches as many at-risk seniors as possible.

Lonely deaths like Pratte’s happen on a near daily basis in Quebec, Girard said, but people don’t talk about it.

“People are alone, they are fragile and they are isolated,” she said. “And even if the system doesn’t always save people,” Girard added of the Pair Program, it at least allows them the dignity of being found in a reasonable time following their death.