BURST
As B.C. struggles to keep up with increasing demand for long-term care beds, the NDP has failed in recent years to move the needle on helping more seniors stay in their homes, advocates say.
Seniors advocate Dan Levitt’s most recent report found that 12.5 per cent of seniors admitted to long-term care homes could have stayed in their own homes if they had got support to do so. Yet the cost of home care remains prohibitive for many families.
Unlike Ontario and Alberta, where home care is free, B.C. charges $10,000 a year for a senior making $31,000 a year to get only one hour of care a day. This has led to a 10 per cent decline in the number of seniors receiving home care over the past five years.
“We recommended that they eliminate the copayment altogether, but especially for people who are on the waiting list for long-term care, because we know that in jurisdictions like Alberta or Ontario where they don’t have the copayment, people aren’t moving into long-term care prematurely,” Levitt said.
Levitt’s report said the unaffordability of home care is increasing the strain on B.C.’s long-term care system, which is already facing a shortage of 2,000 beds and has a waiting list that has soared past 7,200 people.
The advocate also found that housing a senior in a publicly subsidized long-term care home costs the province over $100,000 annually, compared to home care at $15,000 a year.
“We need to at least keep up with the demographics, because we’re falling behind. And when we think about long term care, we may be able to bend the curve a little bit on demand. Really, it would be fractional compared to the number of beds that will be required for seniors who need long-term care.”
The previous seniors advocate, Isobel Mackenzie, who has 20 years of experience in home care, said Thursday that the government has, for the most part, raised the amount spent on home care only by the rate of inflation, which is not enough for the increasing population of seniors.
She said the focus should be on directly funding families to take care of their loved ones, which will help the government save money in the long term.
“There’s no doubt that the we are going to need a lot more long-term care beds than the government currently is projecting to build,” said Mackenzie. “We still could reduce the demand by looking at what would keep people out of long-term care. And what would keep them out of long term care would be high intensity care at home.”
In 2023, Mackenzie found that 61 per cent of seniors didn’t have access to home care in the 90 days before their admission to a long-term care home, despite the province spending $693 million on home care and related supports in the 2021-22 fiscal year.
Mackenzie estimated then it would cost the government $14,000 a year to provide an hour of home support a day to a senior while it then cost $60,000 annually to house a single senior in a long-term care facility.
Budget 2025 greatly increased the amount directly spent on home care, from $45 million in 2024-25 to $146 million in 2025-26 and $163 million in 2026-2027.
In a statement, the Ministry of Health defended its spending on both home care and long-term care, stating that it had increased the budget for long-term care to over $2 billion in 2023 and allocated $354 million over three years as part of the 2024 budget to expand home care, including $227 million to “improve (the) quality and responsiveness” of home care and $127 million for services that provide non-medical supports.
It said it has also spent $175 million on respite care and adult day services over the last five years and signed the Aging with Dignity bilateral agreement with the federal government in 2023, which will give B.C. $733 million over five years to spend on old-age supports.
“With more seniors opting to live at home longer, we believe that means less demand than there would otherwise be for services such as long-term care, alleviating pressures in those aspects of the health-care system,” said then health minister Adrian Dix in 2024.
Mackenzie had told the Times Colonist following the announcement of more money for home care that she was concerned the funds were being used to increase staffing but not to reduce the costs for seniors to receive home care.
This concern has borne out, says Brennan Day, Conservative seniors’ health critic, with the percentage of seniors unable to get home care largely unchanged from 2023.
“They expect to lower the number of beds required by increasing home support and keeping people at home. But we haven’t actually seen that play out in any meaningful way.”
Jeff Moss, executive director of the Jewish Seniors Alliance of B.C., said the lack of seniors care is not new but that he is worried that decades have passed with no government implementing a solution.
He said 65 per cent of Canadian seniors live on under $65,000 a year and can’t afford the types of care that are offered in the province.
“We can’t keep punting this down the road. We need to be able to address it, to actually deal with the crisis that we’re in with the growing seniors population over the next 15 years,” said Moss.
Related
For more health news and content around diseases, conditions, wellness, healthy living, drugs, treatments and more, head to Healthing.ca – a member of the Postmedia Network.