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A report from the province’s seniors’ advocate has found a ballooning waitlist for long-term care beds in B.C., saying the province has failed to keep up with a rapidly aging population.
The report, released Tuesday, found that the number of people waiting for publicly-funded long-term care (LTC) has gone up more than 200 per cent since 2016.
On average, the report found seniors are waiting nearly 10 months to get into a publicly-funded space, compared to five months in 2016.
Advocate Dan Levitt says the number of LTC beds has gone up by five per cent in the last decade — but the number of seniors had gone up by 19 per cent in that timespan.
“We’re seeing a population growth dramatically, but we’re not seeing the pace of new beds being entered into the system keeping pace with that population growth,” he told Gloria Macarenko, host of CBC’s On The Coast.
Levitt said the government needed to build capacity for 16,000 new LTC beds by 2036 to keep pace, representing a 50 per cent increase from current plans.
“The troubling point is that there’s no current plan to build, past a few thousand beds that will be added on in the next five years,” Levitt said.
B.C. Seniors Advocate Dan Levitt says B.C. will need almost 16,000 new beds by 2036 in order to meet growing demand. He says the shortage is due to a lack of investment from the province, particularly with building new care homes in response to looming demand from the aging baby boomer population. On BC Today with host Michelle Eliot, he responds to a caller who had to care for her elderly mother while wait-listed for a long-term care home. He says caregiving and financial responsibility have shifted to family caregivers.
Levitt said that, in the span of the next decade, one in four British Columbians will be over the age of 65 — and without a rapid expansion of long-term care, the burden will be placed on families to provide care.
“We want to see things like affordability being taken into consideration, and more home care, so people can age in place at a time when we don’t have enough long-term care beds in the system,” he said.
‘Woefully inadequate’
Laura Tamblyn Watts, the CEO of the CanAge advocacy organization, said that the B.C. government’s currently-posted funding plans, which don’t forecast more beds past 2030, was “woefully inadequate” given the population trends in the province.
“What we’ve seen is that the B.C. government has been turning its eyes away from the reality of the aging population in British Columbia … and in comparison to Ontario, for instance, it’s decades behind,” she said.
B.C. seniors’ advocate Dan Levitt highlighted the different ways seniors can be discriminated against in the community. For example, he said, seniors’ medical conditions can often be dismissed as a “sign of aging,” which prevents them from accessing treatment. He told BC Today guest host Amy Bell that more education on ageism is needed among health-care workers, as well as employers.
Watts said that the ballooning waitlist for LTC beds has led seniors to desperate situations, including occupying hospital emergency rooms and leaning on family caregivers to get by.
“This is especially true of women who leave the workforce overwhelmingly to provide care,” Watts said.
“That just creates generational problems in terms of poverty, because those people now won’t have enough money to live on when they end up trying to retire.”
Janice Boyle of Three Links Care Society and Rob Gillis from Haro Park Centre say provincial funding cuts have already resulted in reduced services for the people living there – and it could lead to fewer beds, longer waitlists, and more pressure on families.
Watts said that the B.C. government knows how to build quickly, as evidenced by plans to expand modular housing and investments elsewhere.
She also said the province had some of the more innovative seniors’ care in the country, pointing to a “dementia village” research project in Langley that features a number of small homes surrounded by community facilities.
“Unless you have the investment and unless you have the focus of government to take seniors’ care seriously, these pilot projects don’t ever become something we adopt in our system,” Watts said.
The Ministry of Health says the government has spent approximately $3.5 billion in primary care, home health, long-term care, assisted living, and respite services over the last five years and “building more long-term-care homes is one part of our work.”
“We recognize how difficult it is for people and their loved ones to wait for placement in long-term care and assisted living. Ensuring our seniors have the care they need, where and when they need it is a priority of government,” a statement says.
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