Dementia strategy needs quicker rollout

So much is so achingly sad about the story of Elaine Fleming.

The sense of betrayal the 73-year-old Bridgewater woman must have felt when her husband left her at South Shore Regional Hospital last week because he could no longer deal with her range of illnesses, which include COPD, diabetes, fibromyalgia and dementia.

The anguish of her spouse, 71, finding himself “at wit's end” trying to deal with his wife's failing health, without the money to place her in a private nursing home.

Then, there is the knowledge that this isn't just some sort of one-in-a-million hard luck story.

See that man or woman sitting across the breakfast table from you?

That might be the very same person who someday puts a foot in your back and pushes you out the passenger's door in front of the ER without even coming to a full stop.

Not because they're a bad person. This is just the way the world is going.

Don't take my word for it. Have a peek at the Statistics Canada figures: we're perpetually in the running for the province with the highest percentage of senior citizens.

Those raw numbers will swell as more and more of the baby boomers — born between 1946 and 1965 — reach a grand old age.

Here's a shocking figure. In 2021, essentially one year away, the oldest baby-boomers hit 75.

Ken Rockwood, the Kathryn Allen Weldon Professor of Alzheimer Research at Dalhousie University, says that, statistically, the number of age-related health maladies that a person suffers will double during the years from 75 to 90.

“This,” he says, referring to the period before the biggest population boom in Canadian history enters decrepitude (my word not his), “will be seen as the good old days.”

His point is this. We've had it easy, never having to endure a world war, for instance. Now we are about to be tested.

“We've never had to accommodate so many people with such a predictable level of dependence,” Rockwoood says.

As Elaine Fleming's experience underscores, we're woefully unprepared for what is coming.

Rockwood says that the health-care problems of old age need to be examined as an interrelated “package.”

But I only have 700 words so let's look at one small part of that package: dementia, “an umbrella term used to describe a group of diseases that affect the brain and cause a progressive decline in the ability to think, remember and carry out day to day activities.”

The last bit comes from the executive summary of the final report by a special group struck to come up with a dementia strategy for Nova Scotia. The report dropped in the spring of 2015.

“The rollout since then has been very slow,” says Rockwood, a member of the very same strategy group.

Rockwood doesn't question the value of what has been done so far by the provincial Department of Health and Wellness. Working with Alzheimer Society Nova Scotia they have helped to set up First Link, a program that provides dementia sufferers and their caregivers with loads of information about the disease, and also connects them directly to programs and services in their own communities.

But that, he says, only “scratches the surface” of what needs to be done.

Where are the memory clinics, he asks? What about the training to ensure the expertise is there within the system for the tidal wave of oldsters about to descend on our health-care system.

A sense of urgency was obvious in the strategy group's 16 different recommendations. They included enhancing the ability of primary health-care providers to diagnose and manage the care of those living with dementia, and building the kind of system that could provide a “seamless response” for dementia sufferers and their families.

But that urgency doesn't seem to have filtered through to the political level in a province facing so many health-care problems with so little money in the bank.

There are some bright spots, he says, pointing to the innovative geriatric assessment and rehabilitation clinic at St. Martha's Regional Hospital in Antigonish.

We're still a long way from what health-care providers are doing to help the elderly in the Nordic countries, and the United Kingdom.

The idea, he says, is to respond to this impending crisis “in a systematic way not a panicked way.” By seeing the things that work and building on them we can find a way forward.

But we better get moving. Like now. As Rockwood says “this isn't some obscure thing.”

Just ask the Flemings.