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Elder Care in Canada
by author Renee Blackstone

The lobby at the New Vista Care Home in Burnaby, British Columbia, is alive with chatter and laughter. A comfortable lounge area invites visitors to sit, but I wait my turn by checking out the sign that spells out the home’s mission.

“The three plagues of loneliness, helplessness, and boredom account for the bulk of suffering among our Elders …”

Before I have the chance to read the next line, I hear my name called and am told to go on up. Although I’m a few minutes early, Pat Kasprow, the New Vista Care Society’s CEO, is ready to see me.

The elevator up to Kasprow’s fourth-floor office has a menu posted to the wall for that day’s lunch listing a dozen different soups such as French onion, borscht, and chicken rice; hot entrees that include roast lamb with mint jelly, lemon garlic chicken, or vegetable lasagna; and sandwiches and salads that run the gamut: ham and tomato, tuna, smoked chicken with Caesar salad and shrimp, or a BLT salad bowl. Dessert? Who has room, but there’s lemon meringue pie, orange cake, and angel cake with blueberry sauce among the half-dozen or so sweet selections.

This is not your stereotypical nursing home. In fact, it’s a hopeful sign of changing times.

A Fate Worse Than Death?

According to a US study commissioned last year by Clarity, makers of telephone and television amplifiers for the hard-of-hearing, many people over 65 see long-term care as a fate worse than death; 26 percent rated loss of independence as their biggest fear, and 13 percent said they most feared moving into a nursing home.

Attitudes in Canada are equally strident. Results of an Ipsos Reid survey released this spring of Canadians aged 65 to 85 showed 97 percent wanted to reside in their own homes as long as possible, but most also said they avoided discussions with other family members on how to accomplish this for fear it would lead straight to a nursing home.

What’s even more startling is that those aged 75 to 85–when physical and mental decline often starts to become evident–had the attitude that they “won’t require assistance for a long time.”

They’re in denial, according to Sean Simpson, research manager for Ipsos Reid. “When you’re 75, two or three years can mean a world of difference in your health,” Simpson said when the survey results were released.

Holly Quinn, chief nursing officer for Bayshore Home Health, which commissioned the survey, said that anxiety is what keeps most seniors from discussing the prospect of outside help.

“Their greatest fear is that by opening a dialogue, they’ll get put in a nursing home,” Quinn said. “There’s the illusion that, ‘I can do it. I’ll be healthy and okay, and then I’ll just die in my sleep.’”

Such fears and unrealistic hopes aren’t really that surprising. No one ever envisions going happily into a nursing home when they get old, because–admit it–most of us do think of it as a fate worse than death.

Ancient Wisdom

In many parts of the world, even thinking about putting elderly relatives in a nursing home is an alien concept. Craig and Marc Kielburger are co-founders of Free the Children, which is active in the developing world. They wrote a column for the Toronto Star last March recounting a conversation with a tour guide from Cairo, Egypt, named Abdel Rehim about what he perceives as the biggest difference between Egypt and Canada.

“The largest difference is how you treat old people,” Rehim told the Kielburgers. Elders are held in high regard in Egypt, as they are in India, South Korea, eastern Africa, and many other family-centred cultures. Rehim says he can’t understand the North American concept of old age where the contributions of the elderly are expected to dwindle and they eventually end up in a nursing home.

“People in our community would not even speak to you if you did this,” he said.

Remin wants his parents to live with him, his wife, and two children when they are too old to be on their own, something he considers a “great honour,” the Kielburgers reported.

Renee Blackstone is a freelance journalist who spent 20 years with The Province newspaper as Lifestyles, Business, and Food Editor.

Source: alive #312, October 2008