Action needed on seniors care
It shouldn’t be the case that a relatively independent 93-year-old woman has to give up her space at St. Mary’s Villa long-term care facility that’s been her home for the past nine years, as the Saskatoon Health Region looks for a place to house worse-off seniors forced out of an adjacent facility with a rotting floor.
“I don’t want to move. I’m too old. I don’t know where I’ll go,” says Alvina Pitzel, who has lived all her life in Humboldt, but now faces the prospect of having to find accommodation in Mississauga or Moose Jaw where her children live.
Even though health region officials say that local people have told them there are enough spaces for the 10 residents in their 80s and 90s who are being moved out of the assisted living wing, this hardly seems a good solution even in the short term.
It was only last year that the province was saying that wait times for care home spots in Humboldt area are longer than elsewhere in the Saskatoon Health Region. This was after a 94-year-old legally blind woman, whose family had been trying for two years to get her placed on the waiting list for St. Mary’s Villa, was found confused and wandering along Highway 5 one June night and had to be placed in hospital until a vacancy occurred.
Across Saskatchewan, particularly in Saskatoon and Regina, the hospitals are often operating at over-capacity because their beds are too often occupied by the likes of Cecelia Branch, who had been living in a seniors’ complex, doing her own cooking and laundry with some help, until her condition deteriorated to a point where she needs longterm care.
Even though Health Ministry officials have noted that Saskatchewan has one of the best long-term care home systems in Canada, what is becoming evident is that this province needs to proceed quickly with a seniors care strategy that can address the reality of an aging population that’s living longer.
The fact that a legally blind 94-year-old woman couldn’t even get placed on a waiting list for a care home until a near-fatal incident occurred attests to the need to find ways to address the challenge.
And given the glacial pace at which health regions seem to move to address issues that pose potent problems in the long-term — for instance, the St. Mary’s floor was identified as problematic five years ago — the leadership has to come from the Health Ministry and the ministerial level. And it has to go beyond the kind of sole-source contracting for care-home beds that saw the provincial auditor take issue with the Saskatchewan Party government’s deal with Amicus Health Care Inc.
Saskatchewan may have 112.8 long-term care beds per 1,000 people aged 75 or more, and that might even be among the best rates in Canada. But as the overcrowded hospital in Regina and Saskatoon show, and as the heart-wrenching ouster of seniors from the Humboldt facility attest, this issue needs to be tackled quickly.