Thank you very much for inviting me to provide my insights on the impact of COVID-19 on seniors. I have to tell you that in my 25-plus years of working with seniors, I can honestly say that nothing has matched this past year for both moments of breathtaking despair and also occasions of spectacular inspiration.
We know that the nation has been focused on seniors in long-term care, and COVID-19 has revealed for all of us to see what life can be like for some who live in nursing homes. Canadians didn't like what they saw and very loudly told their governments that we need to do better. We are starting to see those commitments flow to long-term care from both our federal and provincial governments. That signals a brighter future, hopefully, but a caveat from somebody who's been around for quite a while is that these fiscal commitments need to be followed with expectations, and the expectations need to be able to be measured. Standards are only as good as their monitoring and enforcement.
We also need to remember that the changes are not going to happen overnight, and most importantly, they are not likely to meaningfully affect those who live in long-term care through the pandemic. We need to take stock of both the physical and the psychological damage experienced by current residents that has come from both their being terrified of a deadly virus and their being kept away from their family and friends and their normal routines.
We know that the rate of prescribing antipsychotics increased exponentially over the pandemic here in B.C. We saw an increase of over 10% in the prescription of antipsychotics. That is the highest annual increase that we have ever seen since we've begun measuring this. Here in B.C., we've wiped out all the gains of the past 10 years to reduce their use. We did that in a single year.
There are also going to be emotional scars on family members that may never heal. The pain for some of these family members from forced separation from their loved ones cannot be overstated, and we really do need to reflect on how our actions were inconsistent with our words and devalued the importance of connections with our loved ones in the last years of our life.
Perhaps most important as we focus on the future of long-term care is that we cannot forget that most seniors not only wish to live at home for the entirety of their lives but they do, and I'm following up on much of what Rose-Mary has spoken to very eloquently. Less than 20% of people over 85 live in long-term care in Canada. The vast majority of frail seniors need to be supported in the community, and those living in the community were also profoundly impacted by the pandemic. The rate at which a person is likely to live alone multiplies by a factor of four once you reach your eighties. The important human connections are found less at home than they are at the library, the recreation centre, the seniors centre, the bank or the grocery store. All of these were closed for long periods of time during COVID, and many struggled before COVID to be able to provide these connections. Staying at home was much more likely to mean being alone for those over 65, and it has revealed for us the importance of these community connections going forward.
The virtual connections that kept many of us going proved elusive for some seniors for a variety of reasons. For some, it was too difficult to become tech savvy at this point in their lives during COVID, but for many it was a cost issue. What COVID has highlighted, and Rose-Mary spoke to this, is how many seniors need to use their community supports because they don't have the income they need. A third of our seniors in Canada are living on the guaranteed income supplement, the GIS. In British Columbia, that means less than a minimum wage job. They are really struggling. This pandemic revealed that the $1,000 a year it costs for the Internet is just too much, so many found themselves cut off because they couldn't go to those recreation centres and seniors centres and get the access that they needed.
As we look to the future, we need to make sure that a person who goes into long-term care only does so after all community supports have been exhausted. If we use British Columbia as an example, we have tremendous work to do. In B.C., seven out of 10 admissions to long-term care were people who had no community home supports 90 days prior to their admissions.
We have a long way to go to maximize the potential of our home support and home care program in Canada. This is in part because it's fragmented in our federated model of delivery and looks very different in provinces.
Cost is a big factor. In my province we are subsidizing people in long-term care to the tune of about $60,000 a year, yet we are giving nowhere near that amount of money to assist people to live independently. Many of the costs that some of us don't associate with health care when people are in their forties, fifties and sixties become health care costs for people in their eighties and nineties.
I'll just conclude by saying that balancing the heartache of the past year has been the brilliant display of care, compassion and concern that Canadians have shown for seniors throughout this pandemic. We put up a number on a website for people to call if they wanted to help seniors and it crashed as thousands of British Columbians came forward to help. We saw that across the country, so we're not indifferent to the needs of those who are in the last years of their life. It's quite the opposite.
We need to find a way to harness this tremendous goodwill of Canadians to support aging with dignity. Hearings such as the ones you're holding today are an important first step.
I thank you for inviting me. I look forward to your questions.