Number of people waiting for publicly-funded long-term care in B.C. doubles since 2016

A report from the province's seniors' advocate has found a ballooning waitlist for long-term care beds in B.C., saying the province has failed to keep up with a rapidly aging population.

The report, released Tuesday, found that the number of people waiting for publicly-funded long-term care (LTC) has gone up more than 200 per cent since 2016.

On average, the report found seniors are waiting nearly 10 months to get into a publicly-funded space, compared to five months in 2016.

Advocate Dan Levitt says the number of LTC beds has gone up by five per cent in the last decade — but the number of seniors had gone up by 19 per cent in that timespan.

"We're seeing a population growth dramatically, but we're not seeing the pace of new beds being entered into the system keeping pace with that population growth," he told Gloria Macarenko, host of CBC's On The Coast.

Levitt said the government needed to build capacity for 16,000 LTC beds per year to keep pace, representing a 50 per cent increase from current plans.

"The troubling point is that there's no current plan to build, past a few thousand beds that will be added on in the next five years," Levitt said.

Levitt said that, in the span of the next decade, one in four British Columbians will be over the age of 65 — and without a rapid expansion of long-term care, the burden will be placed on families to provide care.

"We want to see things like affordability being taken into consideration, and more home care, so people can age in place at a time when we don't have enough long-term care beds in the system," he said.

Laura Tamblyn Watts, the CEO of the CanAge advocacy organization, said that the B.C. government's currently-posted funding plans, which don't forecast more beds past 2030, was "woefully inadequate" given the population trends in the province.

"What we've seen is that the B.C. government has been turning its eyes away from the reality of the aging population in British Columbia ... and in comparison to Ontario, for instance, it's decades behind," she said.

Watts said that the ballooning waitlist for LTC beds has led seniors to desperate situations, including occupying hospital emergency rooms and leaning on family caregivers to get by.

"This is especially true of women who leave the workforce overwhelmingly to provide care," Watts said.

"That just creates generational problems in terms of poverty, because those people now won't have enough money to live on when they end up trying to retire."