Good afternoon, and thank you very much for the opportunity to present to you today.
The Canadian Home Care Association is a national not-for-profit membership association dedicated to advancing excellence in home care through leadership, advocacy, awareness, and knowledge. Closing the Gap Healthcare, the company I work for, is a sustaining patron of the association and works closely with them in order to advance key priorities in home care.
Supporting older Canadians to live at home with dignity, independence, and quality of life is a priority for all home care programs across the country. To achieve this goal, our health and social care services and communities must support an environment where older people not only age in place but are also active and productive members of the community. Older Canadians want to remain in their homes and believe that home care is a critical part of making this happen.
Unfortunately, there's chronic underfunding and suboptimal capacity for the delivery of these important services across all jurisdictions. On average, provinces spend only 3% to 4% of their health care budgets on home care, even though this is proven to be more effective than acute care and is the preferred setting of care for seniors with a frailty.
Even with the federal government's commitment to investing $6 billion in home care in the next 10 years, publicly funded programs will remain challenged to provide these services with the increased demands of an aging population. However, there are a number of innovations taking place, and I think it's important to highlight some of these.
The first one I'd like to speak about is one that facilitates social connectedness among socially isolated seniors. The World Health Organization states, “Belonging to a social network of communication and mutual obligation makes people feel cared for, loved, esteemed and valued. This has a powerful protective effect on health.”
In Canada, in a study of seniors who were surveyed, those over 60 years of age, 43% reported feeling lonely, with 13% feeling chronically lonely, and 30% suffering from episodic loneliness. It's estimated that 1.3 million Canadian seniors suffer from chronic loneliness. Studies show that health deterioration is twice as high in those who have chronic loneliness than with those who do not. As health deteriorates, quality of life deteriorates, as does the increased burden on the health care system. Individuals who engage in meaningful social relationships are healthier, happier, and live longer. However, there are many in our society who are not able to have these social interactions due to a number of limitations.
There are innovative programs, such as one called Keeping Connected, which is offered by Closing the Gap Healthcare. It supports seniors, from a social health and well-being perspective, through planned telephone calls, anything from one to three times a week, with those calls lasting 20 to 30 minutes at a time, based on the assessment of the loneliness of that senior.
When comparing loneliness scores from intake to discharge on this program, findings indicate that Keeping Connected is effective in supporting lonely seniors. In the study that was done, findings included that 97% of these clients felt involved during the calls; 88% felt the companion understood them; 96% of clients looked forward to the calls; 73% felt companions made them feel less lonely; and 99% would recommend the service to other seniors. This is a truly low-cost, high-impact solution to social isolation.
Another one I'd like to raise is leveraging technology to meet the needs of seniors in their homes. With this chronic underfunding and the lack of capacity, we need to leverage technology. Technological advancements have created new options for care delivery, improving people's health, and at the same time improving efficiencies and reducing costs of care. Technology-enabled home care focuses on prevention, independence, and quality of life. For frail seniors with complex care needs, deployment of innovative technology-enabled home care solutions can mean the difference between being an active participant in their community or living their remaining years isolated or in institutional care.
The benefits of innovative technology-enabled home care solutions include better control of chronic illness through remote patient monitoring; improved safety in the home due to the ability for technology to alert caregivers and health care professionals of early signs of deterioration in health; enhanced self-care and person-centred care through the provision of education and active patient engagement; improved safety and medication management for people in their home, a challenge we know that elderly people have; and increased access to appropriate care in rural, remote, and hard-to-service areas, and we have lots of those in our country. Supporting the vital role of family caregivers is also an important part of this.
It's easy to envisage a future health system fully immersed in a range of technologies that support seniors care in the home. However, our collective challenge is how we attain this vision. In advancing the adoption of technology, we need a cohesive strategy, long-term investment, policy changes, and a structured change management process.
In closing, I would like to bring light to a vital part of the home care and health care system: family and friend caregivers.
Canada needs to do more to support caregivers, especially when their continued dedication and contribution are the reasons why so many older Canadians have been and will remain able to age in their places of choice for as long as possible.
A 2012 Statistics Canada study found that one in10 caregivers spends more than 30 hours a week providing care. That's equivalent to a full-time job. They contribute $25 billion in unpaid care every year to our health care system. As 50% of carers are between the ages of 45 and 65, their prime working years, there is a considerable cost to the economy as well, estimated to have been $1.3 billion in 2012.
Although caregiving can be rewarding, caregivers often compromise their health, incur out-of-pocket expenses, and face employment challenges in the absence of appropriate support. Canadians want governments to do more to help seniors and their family caregivers.
Five priority areas have been identified by caregivers and caregiver support groups across the country, and these are: one, safeguard the health and well-being of family caregivers through the funding of caregiver respite programs and other community-based services; two, minimize the financial burden placed on carers by improving awareness of the new Canada caregiver credit and amending this to make it a refundable tax credit; three, support caregiver access to information and resources by developing a national resource database that links with current jurisdictional initiatives; four, assist employers to provide supportive workplaces that recognize and respect caregivers' needs by funding an employer-for-caregivers consortium that would equip employers with information, tools, and resources; and, five, invest in research on caregiving as a foundation for evidence-informed decision-making.
While we have made advances in some of these areas, there is much more to be done to ensure caregivers are recognized, valued, and supported in their vital role.
Once again, Canadians believe that home, not a hospital or a long-term care facility, is the best place to recover from an illness or injury, manage long-term conditions, and live out one's final days. Our federal government can enable the meaningful change that will be needed to meet the growing and evolving needs of our aging population by playing a key leadership role on this issue of significant national importance.
Thank you very much for allowing me to share this with you. I'm happy to elaborate during question time.