There's an army of senior volunteers out there. Do we have tax credits for volunteers? I don't know. Certainly that's something. Can you find a way to engage that army of senior volunteers to help in the health care system? You're already giving some tax credits to people who are caregiving, but we have to look at how much support we can give to caregivers. Are they still allowed to contribute to CPP while they're doing the caregiving role?
If someone has multiple chronic diseases and a family member is not taking time to care for them, they will end up in hospital. That is almost guaranteed. So as other people have said, you really have to look at caregiver support. We've talked about tax incentives, but that doesn't really help low-income seniors. Think about other incentives that could bring low-income seniors into the volunteer pool.
We've talked about mobility and falls, and those are other huge issues. We really need to look at exercise programs that prevent de-conditioning. There's a lot of literature out there on programs that prevent de-conditioning and falls. Then we have to look at incentives to bring seniors into those programs. We can't just build them; we have to entice people to come in.
The bottom line for us is that the weak link in the health care system is really community care. I agree 100% that we have to look at health promotion and prevention measures. However, we have to recognize that people eventually become ill, and then we need to have a community care system that is strong enough and integrated enough to keep them out of hospital. Right now we don't. We have a bunch of community care silos that compete for money. They do not cooperate or collaborate, and they have no accountability. There is really no connection between community care and acute care. So we have to look at the system itself. If you do research, it will have to look at the entire system design.
Thank you.