To the Editor,
On June 27, Nanaimo city council voted unanimously to support two resolutions that will be tabled at the Union of B.C. Municipalities Convention to be held in Vancouver next week.
Those resolutions will provide Christy Clark and her government with a significant opportunity to demonstrate whether or not her stated goal of “placing families first” is an authentic one.
The resolutions encourage the Ministry of Health to enhance community-based seniors’ care and to help municipalities fund relatively inexpensive community-based outreach and health prevention programs for seniors.
The loss of care over the years has resulted in extraordinary numbers of our seniors ending up unnecessarily hospitalized at an enormous cost to the public purse.
And it’s also at the expense of large numbers of hospital beds that could be used to deliver other services to the community.
When the Ombudsperson’s final report on seniors’ care problems comes out in a few months, she will undoubtedly mention problems in access to care.
She will also profile some of the consequences of reduced and inadequate care, both in terms of significant health issues and in terms of the devastating sense of loneliness and isolation that more and more of our seniors are experiencing.
It’s difficult to imagine reasons why our government would ignore the resolutions.
Community-based solutions are both cost effective for the overall public purse and health effective for our growing seniors population.
And surely Premier Clark can’t ignore the fact that cities such as Nanaimo, Vancouver, Maple Ridge, Burnaby, White Rock, New Westminster and others have already supported the resolutions, because they see them as both cost-effective and good for seniors in their communities.
It will be very interesting to see the government’s response.
Kim Slater
Nanaimo