The common factor in all of these areas is the fact that people want to help people. But it is strange to observe that as our society has more organized groups than ever before to advocate for patients and charities to raise funds for various institutions, we seem to have lost sight of “the need for families to help their own family members”.

With long-term institutions bulging at the seams, and resultant Emergency Room wait times for patients waiting in acute care facilities for a more suitable long-term care bed, I’ve come to the realization that building more hospitals or even long-term care institutions isn’t going to solve the access problem. Without the staffing required for these institutions to function safely and efficiently, there would be little point.

The question really becomes:

How to allow more aging patients to be cared for in their homes or in their relatives’ homes?

A relatively new program, Aging at Home, has been created to keep patients in their homes and out of hospitals, when possible. Its success is likely to come only if we have the work-force available to provide care in this manner. Many patients would like to stay as autonomous as possible in their own familiar surroundings but often a crisis of some kind, a fractured hip, difficulties with dementia, or other health problem, winds up pointing them toward hospitals or long-term care institutions.

As we have seen with end-of-life care, it is possible to have government strategies that support family members acting as care-givers for patients in their last months. However, with the fastest growing demographic being the over 85 year olds, we should be considering significant mechanisms that allow family members to be supported through government funding while they care for their relatives at home.

Part of the issue with this approach is that care-givers often have to leave their jobs to care for elderly relatives. With the increasing health care costs of institutional care, it makes more sense to provide employers with some incentive to have employees working part time or even part-time from home while they care for their elderly family member. Financial support for families willing to take on this care is reasonable since the cost of caring for the elderly patient in hospital on a chronic basis is very significant.

Not all families would be able to manage this but families who are interested in attempting this sort of family care should be encouraged and supported with more options for respite care, more options for day hospital visits and more employer supported mechanisms for part-time work.

Trouble is that many families are spread across the country. Children leave for jobs and better prospects in other jurisdictions and we should not forget that a 90 year old may have 70 year old children. These are stumbling blocks for many families, but not all.

Families must be encouraged to support their elderly and more mechanisms to support care-givers must be established. Knowing that respite is close at hand, that their employer is supportive of their life/work balance, and that government sees their efforts as valuable to society, it is possible that more family members would choose to provide ongoing long-term care to their loved ones.