RED DEER - Health Minister Fred Horne on Wednesday announced a wholesale change in the government’s approach to housing and caring for seniors who need assistance.
In coming years, he said, older Albertans who can no longer live independently will ideally find a permanent home in a single facility, instead of bouncing from home to home as their health deteriorates and their need for support increases.
The government’s model for new “continuing care centres” marks a major paradigm shift, with the province moving away from confusing terms such as “supported living” and “long-term care” toward building facilities that can meet the needs of all seniors.
“This is about taking away the focus on money and beds and institutions, and refocusing continuing care on people, and families and communities,” Horne said.
“It really is designed to allow aging in place. That’s a term that has been used a lot over the last several years. What we mean by aging in place is designing a facility that allows us to find and support the needs of seniors as they change over time.”
Practically speaking, the province wants support for seniors to stretch from simple home care such as bathing assistance all the way to end-of-life care, so people can die at home instead of in hospitals. Couples will be able to live together in continuing care centres, even if one needs no support. Ideally, once in a facility they will never move again.
Horne said Alberta currently has a very “complicated system” with at least six levels of care that can be difficult for Albertans to understand and navigate. When people’s health deteriorates and their level of required care changes, they are often forced to move.
“That really doesn’t serve us very well in terms of working with the community and planning for the future,” Horne said. “That might serve bureaucracies, that might serve administrators ... but it doesn’t serve us as communities.”
The idea was a key plank in Premier Alison Redford’s summer campaign for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party.
The first step, Horne said, is to construct two “demonstration facilities” where the model will be tried and evaluated.
The projects – the Clearview facility in Red Deer and the Evanston facility in Calgary – will be completed in 2014. The province has previously announced $34 million in funding for the two facilities, and Covenant Health will contribute $20.9 million.
The province has in recent years invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the construction and renovation of facilities to work within the existing model, and Horne said the government has no plans to stop construction and upgrading while the new model is being developed and tested.
“The implications for existing continuing care, I think we’ll have to wait and see,” Horne said. “We are ... embarking on a new model of care and philosophy of care, and I would like to think that in many of our (existing) facilities it will be possible to implement most or all of that new philosophy.
“Sometimes the barriers have nothing to do with the bricks and mortar, they have to do with the way that we set up the funding and the rules and the regulations and the restrictions.”
The existing accommodation standards will not be affected by the change, Horne said, and the government has no plans to lift the existing cap on long-term care fees as a result of the change.
Covenant CEO Patrick Dumelie called the new model “resident-focused care.”
“What we’re trying to get away from is these different classifications and levels of care that work well for programs but that don’t work well for people,” he said. “If you think of that from a senior’s perspective or a family’s perspective, it’s like a maze.”
Both Horne and Dumelie said the evaluation process will be public.
“We want this to work,” Horne said. “Will this evolve into a cookie-cutter model for the rest of Alberta? No. Absolutely not. Again, the philosophy is to reconnect with local communities in planning for community care.”
Red Deer North MLA Mary Anne Jablonski is chair of the province’s Continuing Care Centre Secretariat and the former minister of seniors and community supports.
She acknowledged the province faces significant challenges in revamping the system, but said the transformation is both possible and necessary.
“There could be retrofits required in some of our earlier buildings, but many of them have been built to a very high standard,” Jablonski said. “I’m confident that when we prove that this works – and I think it will – that we’ll be able to work with the buildings that we have now.”
Bureaucratic challenges are manageable as well, she said, because the province started tearing down barriers between ministries several years ago.
In any event, she said Albertans’ values are changing and the system must reflect that.
“Spouses don’t want to leave each other. To move people from place to place when they’re elderly and unwell creates unnecessary anxiety,” Jablonski said. “We work within a system that isn’t working anymore, so we need to change that system.”
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