The elder boom
Network addressing care for older Canadians.
The fact that the population of older adults in Canada is mushrooming is well-known. U of T social work professor Lynn McDonald wants us to know something else — that Canada is not prepared to care for the 9.2 million Canadians who will be 65 or older by the year 2041.
On the plus side, McDonald — a specialist in issues related to older adults and former board director of the Canadian Association of Gerontology — and colleagues in 15 universities (as well as businesses and government agencies) now have the means to address this issue.
In May, the Government of Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence program awarded $1.6 million to establish the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly (NICE).
“The system we have now for caring for older adults is inadequate. Just imagine what it will be like in 2041 if we don’t begin addressing it seriously now,” says McDonald, director of NICE and U of T’s Institute for Life Course and Aging.
“The care of older people in this country has been neglected. That neglect is rooted in the fact that health professionals don’t have the knowledge in geriatric medicine, nursing and social work, so they just run by the seat of their pants. If we are to care properly for older adults, health professionals need the right knowledge. And we need more people — only eight geriatricians graduated from Ontario universities last year.”
McDonald says the challenge of caring for older adults is compounded by the complexity of aging. “When one thing goes wrong, three other things do too. How do you put everything together? Gerontology is, by definition, transdisciplinary work. You need professionals working in a team — you can’t just have one doctor and nobody else and that is happening too often today.”
Headquartered at U of T, the NICE Network will apply its work coast-tocoast. The network’s overarching aim, as set out in its official vision statement, is to “enhance education and training to achieve high standards of delivery of health and social care, not only for Canada’s present seniors but also for its burgeoning future population.”
Three streams of activity will help the network achieve this goal:
– transferring research information about best practices for the care of the elderly through teams made up of academics and field professionals who will, in turn, create easy-to-understand information tools for health workers;
– offering fellowships for graduate and undergraduate students to join the network as research assistants — and, McDonald hopes, be inspired to take up gerontology as a specialty in their careers; and
– including continuing education specialists who teach at the community level in the network’s research, thus enabling them to transfer knowledge to their institutions.
McDonald emphasizes that another key group will also be involved — senior citizens. “They are the customers of our knowledge, so it will be critical that we have their evaluations about whether our tools and strategies are actually useful. “The level of training and the way services for older adults are delivered in this country has to change dramatically,” says McDonald. “We have great support from the federal government now and we think we really can make a solid difference.”