Thank you very much for providing us the opportunity to speak to you this morning. We have been granted 10 minutes, so we'll be brief.
We're members of the Council of Senior Citizens Organizations of British Columbia and also members of the COSCO Seniors’ Health and Wellness Institute.
First of all, I'll speak about the workshops that COSCO has. We have 43 different topics and they're presented free of charge all around the province. There's a focus on the ways we can influence our own well-being mentally and physically. Then my friend Kathleen Jamieson will speak about the need for home care for seniors with some form of mental health or cognitive decline.
Early in 2007, COSCO began a program of health care workshops. We realized as we looked at health care in British Columbia that obviously acute care is essential, but we felt that there needed to be more attention paid to preventive measures that could delay and even prevent if health literacy programs were established. We prepared the workshops in several ways. First they were prepared by medical students at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of their teachers. From the beginning, we realized that mental and physical health were intertwined, so as the time went on and we experienced a huge demand for the fall workshop, which was our first one, we gradually added others until now we have 43 different topics. We don't give advice in a personal way; we provide information and we provide resource direction, you might say, in that every workshop is accompanied by a list of organizations that people can turn to to ask for help and assistance.
We gradually through the years added workshops. Up until now, more than 30,000 people have attended. Everybody, when they're there, is asked to think about how the facts that we're giving can be used for their own well-being. We have a mental health workshop. We have a social connectedness workshop. We want to remind people how important it is to keep in touch with others. We have a caregiver workshop. We alert people to the possibilities of burnout and ways to avoid it.
Our facilitators are all seniors. They're given five days of training before they present workshops. They're not paid. They get out-of-pocket expenses. In fact, everybody involved with the program is a volunteer. We have no paid staff. We don't have an office. We are gradually reaching out to more and more parts of the province as we get facilitators around the province—Okanagan, the Kootenays. We have funding from grants and donations, and we have a pan-Canadian approach to our work. We've trained people in both Alberta and Newfoundland to facilitate workshops, and our power point presentations have been provided to other provinces.
From the very beginning, mental health and physical health have been part of the institute's programs. Many seniors tell us that they fear mental incapacity more than they fear physical incapacity. The goal of our workshops is to increase understanding and minimize fear, avoidance, and denial.
This is the final workshop I'm going to mention, but our “navigating the health care system” is a fine example of how to proceed, how to get the most out of the care that is available.
Kathleen.