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Beaufort Delta criticizes care plan

Katie May
Northern News Services
Published Monday, January 31, 2011

BEAUFORT DELTA

As NWT residents get older, inevitably putting more pressure on an already over-burdened and exorbitantly expensive health care system, regional leaders see their parents' generation relegated to a few remaining long-term care beds and worry the system won't be able to support them much longer.

The number of seniors in the Beaufort Delta region is rapidly increasing while the availability of traditional long-term care facilities continues to shrink in those smaller communities.

The Department of Health and Social Services is moving toward more cost-effective home care programs.

But with the Inuvik Regional Hospital's perpetual wait-list and the government's recent decision to stop offering long-term care at the Joe Greenland Centre in Aklavik, some residents say home support isn't enough for their elders and won't be, one day, for themselves.

Health and Social Services Minister Sandy Lee visited the region in mid-January to explain challenges the Beaufort Delta Health Authority faces and to hear residents' concerns about the system.

She was bombarded by comments from leaders from every Mackenzie Delta community, including Tsiigehtchic's John Norbert, who renewed an oft-repeated plea for a full-time nurse and fully stocked medical centre in the Arctic Red River hamlet of 130.

There, residents have one part-time home care worker, a community health representative, a wellness worker and residents recently trained in first aid.

But they do not have a nurse, RCMP, ambulance service nor, since the department shut it down in fall 2010, access to the former tele-health phone line.

When something goes wrong, people in Tsiigehtchic often can't do anything about it, Norbert said.

"I'm a really frustrated person right now," he said, as president of the community's elders committee. "We really need a lot of help in our little town of Tsiigehtchic."

"We have no control over anything."

Like Norbert, Mackenzie Delta MLA David Krutko remains frustrated that there are more than 160 elders in his riding communities of Tsiigehtchic and Aklavik, with more than 70 people over the age of 70 in Fort McPherson alone - a hamlet of 800 people. Yet there is no real long-term care centre outside of Inuvik. And while having more elders in the territory doesn't necessarily mean they all won't be able to take care of themselves, there's no denying that rates of chronic health problems - such as obesity and diabetes - are climbing higher in NWT than they ever have before.

Krutko said it's "mind-boggling" that the department continues to fund programs such as midwifery in the South and North Slave regions knowing that the Beaufort Delta Health Authority is in a $5.5 million deficit and can't afford to hire another nurse.

"I've been battling this for 10 years," he said. "Simply coming back to this table year after year, raising the same issues - I know Tsiigehtchic's frustrated - I'm just as frustrated as they are. I just can't believe that we still can't get, in this day and age, a nurse for a community."

In response to the outcry, Lee pledged the department would do more to help Beaufort Delta communities, particularly Tsiigehtchic, where she said officials would start elder abuse workshops as soon as possible.

"We have done a study of long-term care needs in the territory and it has been reviewed every five years. We've looked at the demographics and we know that the region's not an exception in terms of our population growing older," Lee said.

"We need to enhance community support and community capacity so that we train our people in our communities and make them available to look after the elderly at home," she continued. "We need to continue to think that institution in a hospital is the last resort - it's the most expensive and impersonal care and it could never replace what we could do as a family and as a community."

But the minister made no promises about getting a full-time nurse to serve Tsiigehtchic.

"Who does the work that nurses used to do is changing," Lee said. "So I think the important thing is that we make sure that every community has people they can rely on to get the services they need."

The department's main strategic document, A Foundation for Change - up for review next year - highlights long-term care as a major need across the territory. It promises, by 2012, to increase access to home care, to standardize the delivery of continuing care and to set up a territorial long-term care admissions committee to ensure "Northerners have fair and consistent access to long-term care no matter where they are in the NWT."

Gwich'in Tribal Council President Richard Nerysoo balked at Lee's suggestion that the Department of Health and Social Services has already done a sufficient study of the region's imminent future long-term care needs.

"We think about the idea of closing down elders' facilities and yet we've never done a good assessment of the demographics that will identify what our needs are going to be," he said, arguing that the new seniors' complex in Inuvik, plans for a similar set up in Aklavik and existing independent living centres in other communities simply isn't enough to support elders.

"We are growing old," Nerysoo said. "Many of us don't necessarily want to live in Inuvik or those that choose to live in Inuvik want a facility where they're going to be able to be taken care of."

Fort McPherson Chief William Koe, like many of the region's residents, has personal experience visiting elderly family members at the Inuvik hospital.

"It is hard when they come here because they've got no support from family and nobody to help them, nobody to bring them traditional food or speak Gwich'in to them," he told Lee.

"We are very concerned in the communities that there's going to be more elders coming this way (to Inuvik). There's going to be an overcrowding in that building, and then what are you guys going to do?"

Lee said the department's long-term care assessment for the territory is continually reviewed every five years and will be looked at in-depth during the 2012 departmental review.

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