Steady, clear effort needed to meet seniors’ needs

As a political priority, seniors’ issues have fallen in and out of favour in B. C. over the past couple of decades. The NDP government maintained an Office for Seniors as part of the Ministry of Health and Ministry Responsible for Seniors.

Former premier Gordon Campbell included providing the best system of support for seniors in one of his five great goals for a golden decade; he established a Premier’s Council on Aging and Seniors’ Issues and for a time maintained a minister of state responsible for seniors.

Now, in response to a comprehensive catalogue of deficits in the way the provincial government serves the needs of seniors – or more to the point, fragile seniors – the Liberal government has announced that it will be creating the position of a seniors’ advocate as part of yet another seniors’ plan.

What emerges from this parade of good intentions is that the rhetoric around seniors’ issues has outpaced the useful action on the ground.

As the report by B. C. Ombudsperson Kim Carter struggles to make clear, seniors and their families now face a confusing and often inadequate patchwork of services when they reach a point in their lives when they can no longer be self- sufficient. It’s not that nothing is being done; there are many worthy initiatives. But we still hear too many horror stories about individuals who have fallen through the cracks.

Carter makes more than 170 recommendations on ways to improve the system. Many of these can and should be acted on immediately because they offer benefits without inflicting significant costs. One common theme is that service providers and health authorities do a poor job of tracking the needs of their clients and the services they offer. Inadequate information makes it difficult or impossible to make coherent management decisions about the allocation and adequacy of resources.

But others will require more money. They need to be assessed in the context of other pressing needs for services that are financed with tax dollars.

One clear opportunity is the inadequacy of home support services. Anything that can help seniors live in their homes longer has the potential to add to their quality of life and put off the need for much more expensive supportive living or hospitalization costs. That includes simple things like help with basic housekeeping or shopping.

In the past decade, the number of seniors in B. C. has grown by 20 per cent. That percentage and the number of people it represents will continue to grow. Meeting their needs along with providing increasingly expensive health care to all British Columbians is one of the key challenges of our time.

Part of the solution to maintaining a caring society in which seniors get the attention they deserve is to ensure that we continue to nurture our economy, so it can produce the jobs and revenues needed to pay for what will by necessity be a more expensive support network because of our changing demographics. But we also need to do a better job of managing those services.

Given the history of treating seniors’ services as a cyclical fad, it is apparent that more than lofty goals, what we need is a set of clear management objectives followed by the unglamorous but crucial day- to- day management of the system and all its components to ensure those objectives are being met.