My name is Janet Craik. I'm the executive director for CAOT. I'm also an occupational therapist.
CAOT is the national organization representing 16,000 occupational therapists across Canada. Our mission is to advance excellence in occupational therapy, and our vision is that someday occupational therapy will be valued and accessible across Canada.
For those who don't know, occupational therapists are regulated health professionals who work with people who are unable to participate in important activities of daily living, ADLs, due to a range of challenges or conditions. For our seniors, these conditions often involve declining mobility, dementia, or vision loss, and they create barriers to everyday living. Occupational therapists are here to create solutions for living.
Today we really want to talk to you about the problems confronting seniors, and low-cost, high-impact solutions that will enable them to live at home, minimize the risk of injury, in particular falls, and save on expensive hospitalization and institutionalization. We want to focus on solutions to help seniors live at home, improve the quality of their lives, and save the health care system money.
We also want to talk about the challenges associated with accessing these solutions in homes and communities across Canada. We share a common goal, which is to keep seniors in their homes, active and engaged, contributing to their families, their communities, and our society. We can offer recommendations for health care system improvements and innovations.
Our current health care system is oriented to helping seniors once they have experienced a health decline and have landed in hospital or the doctor's office. We can do better than this. Preventative measures can be done, such as home modifications and ADL training, so that injuries and falls do not happen. This enables seniors to remain in their homes, connected to their families and communities, and out of hospital.