Holistic Care For Adults, Seniors, and the Elderly

I am very fortunate to live in a great country. I am fortunate to live in an amazingly beautiful province - one of the most prosperous in this great country. In fact, we are so prosperous that our premier has seen fit to award himself and his cabinet ministers a whopping bonus - 35% for the premier and 30 % for cabinet.

What did they do to earn this whopping bonus? Well you might ask. Affairs were going swimmingly when our newly elected premier took office. We were experiencing a booming economy. The influx of eager workers stretched relocation resources to the breaking point. Housing starts were up, real estate was sizzling, and we had an amazing surplus budget.

Free universal Health Care was promised - and delivered. Money was poured into medical research; Seniors' and Adult Care issues, and In-Place Aging and Care became buzz words in political discussion; education finally seemed to be coming to the forefront.

Now, suddenly it seems, we are in the midst of recession. The provincial government is seeking budget cuts to stem the bleeding and shore up several billions of deficit.

...and the cuts are being made in the very sectors where those affected are among the most vulnerable in society - the elderly, our youth, and the mentally/emotionally challenged..

Political-speak is now full of such terms as "rebalanced budgets","health reforms" and "upgraded infrastructure". After laying out over forty-million in managerial bonuses last year, the premier is now calling for voluntary wage cuts and wage freezes from educators and health care workers.

We all remember the 90s when similar request were made. "Take the cuts, freeze the wages, save your jobs" - that was the call to battle the economic downturn at that time. The jobs were lost anyway.

The premier and his staff have gallantly offered to take salary cuts of 15% for the premier and 10% for cabinet - a laudable and reasonable offer until you consider that it still leaves them all a 20% pay raise.

Tuition hikes may now cost potential university students their opportunity to earn a higher education.

School districts that ratified five-year contracts in order to bring a level of stability to their educators and students are now being told they must re-examine the terms with an eye to cuts and cost savings. What will this do to the quality of education?

Child day-care, chronically underfunded has been all but ignored. Subsidies have, in fact, decreased, and little has been done to encourage child care providers to better educate and better equip their workers.

Many couples are hard-pressed to afford child care even given the full benefits they are able to access through child tax credits and day care allowances. Single parent families are even less equipped to cover such expenses.

A single parent who works at a low paying job has to rely on subsidized child care. Many of these agencies are understaffed and over-booked, making it is almost impossible to secure a place.

...and what will be the effect of these cumulative erosion on the quality of care available to our seniors and adults most in need of care?

Though Health Care premiums were abolished, those on long-term or ongoing drug therapies will soon be required to pay directly or subscribe to a new provincial drug insurance system that will exceed the recently abolished Health Care premiums.

The new, privatized version of Health Care instituted by the province has effectively reduced our once-proud service provider to a profit driven model of top-heavy, bottom-line balancing, number crunching bean counters.

Holistic and pastoral care - any kind of spiritual care - has long been a hot-button topic when it comes to providing for those in need of physical healing. Reputable studies exist that clearly show the connection between treating the whole patient and improved recovery times, as well as a sharp decrease in the need for repeat hospitalizations.

Many physicians would argue now that we have gone too far along the path of treating the ailment to the detriment of the patient.

People are not merely physical beings. Doctors are beginning to actively promote the idea of treating the whole person rather than just the symptoms they present. Pastoral and holistic care play a large part in this effort to treat the patient rather than treating the problem.

Recently though, pastoral and holistic care in our hospitals have all but disappeared. The many years spent building positive working relationships among various religious groups, First Nations elders and associations, and other non-denominational care providers might as well have been for naught. In a series of draconian measures, under the guise of cost-conscious budget balancing, these organizations have been removed from the hospitals.

With no public consultation, pastoral care positions have been cut, community links cut and teaching posts removed through a series of "restructurings".

The men and women who spent their lives in service to others, setting up such programs, creating the links to the community at large, and organizing networks of lay volunteers, have been dismissed from their positions for coming forward with this information.

One of the deepest cuts took place at the Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, one of Alberta's premier psychiatric facilities.

Nearly 250 psychiatric beds have been closed. Already built additions to the hospital are not being staffed, and existing long-term care facilities are to be downsized. Construction of new facilities is being deferred in favor of user-pay assisted living facilities.

Those most vulnerable are now the most at risk.

Half-way houses and transitional care facilities are already seriously overtaxed. We cannot begin to rely on them to absorb the resultant stream of adult patients who will will be released when the beds close

Adults in desperate need of long-term supervised care will now be, quite literally, out on the streets, left to fend for themselves.

These are people who are unable to successfully deal with life on their own. Most of them cannot manage their own medication. Many cannot cope on any level even approaching the normal, day to day functioning most of us take for granted.

When I first moved here in the late nineteen-seventies, there were few half-way houses or transitional facilities. Group homes for needy adults were almost non-existent - safe homes where they could live together with some independence but still receive the assistance they required to support a decent quality of life.

They were left to take up station on the margins of society, peopling the street corners and wandering in and out of traffic whenever their medications ran out or were lost or stolen.

Since that time, great strides were made towards humanizing an archaic system that either locked these challenged adults away or discharged them with little or no support to be dealt with by an overburdened welfare system that was never equipped nor intended to meet their needs.

Half-way houses, adult day homes, adult day care programs, and a myriad of other systems were gradually mobilized and set in place to help out.

My sister works in an adult day care program, where the individuals she supports are afforded a quality of life that otherwise would be far beyond the means of their families and loved ones.

The thought of losing all that we have fought so hard to win, is disheartening. It seems that we expend so much effort with one set of governing bodies, educating, building, exploring how to best serve our needy populations, laboriously putting systems in place, only to have the succeeding government balance its budget by dismantling them.

There must be better options that don't jeopardize our most vulnerable citizens. There must be choices we could make that don't tear down the very supports we are trying to improve.

Cutting from the front lines - cutting back hospital staff, child-care workers, tuition subsidies, elder hospice workers, pastoral care givers - none of the slash-and-burn tactics have ever worked in the past. They have, instead, impaired our ability to offer the levels of child day care, education, senior and adult care that we are capable of sustaining. It is not right choice now for pruning the deficit.

I have read that one definition of insanity is repeating the same action again and again, yet expecting a different result. The changes to our child and health care, education, and long-term care systems certainly seem to fall into that category.

© 2010 Text by Elle Fredine, All rights reserved

Pets and service animals can be another marvelous facet of holistic care for our seniors -

Check out this link and comment from friend, Bodybreak

"You know, at times I would go home at night and cry, there were just so many seniors that were in need of true love and care. I worked with a team in Canada called

Therapeutic Paws Of Canada,

http://www.tpoc.ca/

Thank you for your wonderful Hub."