Indigenous elders forced from reserves by lack of long-term care beds
CBC
When today's First Nations elders were young, many were forced to leave their home communities to stay in residential schools — and now that forced exit is happening again.
With few long-term beds available on some reserves, elders with significant health-care needs must leave and spend their last years back in an outside institution.
For Kory Duck Chief's aunt, that means Strathmore, Alta., 40 kilometres away from her home in Siksika.
"She's quite lonely, she's not able to speak to anybody in her own language, which she grew up with and still speaks quite fluently," said Duck Chief.
"That's just like taking you out of Calgary, even though you've lived your entire life there," she said. "You truly see how much hurt the families go through, how much frustration they go through, simply because they're stressing out."
Duck Chief manages a small elders lodge on reserve. But because provincial funding is targeted to larger facilities in urban centres, the Siksika facility is too small and has too few staff to accommodate community members with complex health needs.
This is a common problem facing many Indigenous elders and communities, and it means many of the elders first sent away as children to residential school now face the same painful separation and institutional living in their final years.
In May, Alberta's continuing care review flagged the issue and said there's also a lack of culturally appropriate care in off-reserve care homes where these elders end up.
There are only 147 supportive spaces for elders on-reserve today. And with the number of elders needing care expected to double by 2030, the review said 1,088 new spaces will be needed.
It said that could be achieved with a new model of small-scale facilities.
In Siksika, the 12-bed elders lodge is on the edge of the townsite, with windows overlooking a cow pasture.
It sports linoleum flooring with a 1980s vibe, and the narrow hallways are dented by the manoeuvring of countless wheelchairs, but staff banter with the residents in a cheerful, welcoming manner.
It's quiet on a recent Friday. A few residents eat lunch in their wheelchairs in the cafeteria; others are out in the community with family. Several bedrooms are empty, simply because the facility doesn't have the staff to accommodate elders with certain stages of dementia or other complex diagnoses.
A business proposal the First Nation submitted to Alberta Health includes building upgrades, funding for regulated staff to help high-needs residents and more staff to reach a standard nurse-to-resident ratio.
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