In Quebec, there is a striking disparity between funding for seniors’ accommodation centers and investments in home care. For its part, Denmark, which faces a demographic challenge similar to ours, allocates 65% of its support budget for seniors to home care. For Quebec, nearly 70% of the budget is spent on accommodation, a completely reversed proportion.
How does Denmark manage to provide quality care and services where people choose to stay? By promoting and decompartmentalising the work of healthcare professionals at home, by massively financing home adaptation with equipment for maintaining autonomy, by using technologies for safety and by relying on caring communities.
A utopia ? Denmark’s experience shows that we can offer an impressive number of hours of home care and services for advanced loss of autonomy, and this, at a lower cost than by constructing new buildings.
The cost of a place in a CHSLD in Quebec: $91,000 per year.
The cost of caring for a senior with severe loss of autonomy at home: $86,200 per year.
Elders’ houses
The current government’s flagship project to meet Quebec’s demographic challenges are seniors’ homes. A project that was never wanted by anyone, neither by experts nor by the seniors themselves. Initially, this project was valued at $2.4 billion, or nearly $600,000 on average to build a square.
However, the economic situation has caused construction costs to jump to such exorbitant prices that it has forced the cessation of certain calls for tenders; a failed bet that lost $44 million after new bid attempts.
Meanwhile, what has been the additional investment in home care this year? Only $150 million. It’s probably not a priority. For every dollar spent on concrete, we should invest just as much, if not more, on people. When we think of all that we could do with a real desire to change things to meet the need widely expressed by Quebec seniors, which is to stay in the home of their choice, rooted in their community, as long as possible.
But beware, home care does not only mean receiving services in a home! It simply means giving people the choice of receiving them in a house, an apartment or even a private seniors’ residence, for as long as possible. In other words, the place of residence, as in Denmark, should not be an obstacle to the right of individuals to receive quality care.
It would be nothing less than a revolution, a concrete way of respecting seniors and their decision-making autonomy.
The Quiet Revolution was accompanied by a major demographic challenge, the baby boom. Quebec society is, this time, ripe to take up a new challenge: to become a Quebec worthy of its elders.