Are seniors being pressured into retirement homes by lack of community services?
Ads for retirement homes often feature an older couple relaxing in comfortable surroundings, playing a board game or enjoying a meal with friends.
- Ads for retirement homes often feature an older couple relaxing in comfortable surroundings, playing a board game or enjoying a meal with friends.
- They look well — and young for their age — with broad smiles and perfect silver hair.
Assisted living
- In Canada, retirement homes (also known by other names like assisted living) are increasingly for-profit living facilities for older adults.
- Across Canada, monthly fees range from $1,600 to over $6,000 for spaces ranging from 300 to 600 square feet.
- In almost one-third of these cases, retirement home residents or their caregivers said they would be better off living elsewhere, such as in long-term care (LTC) homes, where they can receive 24-hour access to nursing and personal support services.
Unmet health-care needs
- For example, retirement home residents living with dementia, and who can afford specialized memory care services, are less likely to move to a LTC home.
- Clearly, the service and health-care needs of retirement home residents are not being met, nor were these being met in the community, compelling the move to a retirement home in the first place.
- Despite evidence that the medical needs of retirement home residents have been growing more complex, the role of primary care medical providers is not regulated, nor is there much incentive to practice in these settings.
- Dehydration related delirium (confusion) that could be addressed on site can instead lead to hospital admission and premature institutional care.
Designed for institutionalization
- Our health-care system seems designed to foster premature institutionalization.
- They will also allow older people greater choice over — and ability to afford — whatever lifestyle they prefer.
- The Schlegel Chair endowment was a charitable donation to the University of Waterloo, and there is no personal obligation to the donor.