We tend to think in terms of promising practices, and around dementia care one of the things that works quite well is day programs, but along with day programs, you need to think about some of the infrastructure that's required, such as transportation to get people to and from those day programs. You can imagine, particularly as people age, that their partner may no longer be capable of helping them into a car or getting them out of the house. When we talk about care work, there are a lot of very physical aspects to care work that can't be forgotten. An older person may no longer be capable of driving themselves.
There is also an issue with the cost of these programs. While for some people maybe $30 to $40 per day is not prohibitive, for other people it is a lot of money.
Finally, there isn't sufficient space, so we are outstripping our capacity in terms of spaces for these day centre programs. This is particularly in communities that are growing rapidly. I think about York region which surrounds York University as one of those areas. This is one strategy that the Alzheimer Society has taken upon themselves. There are other organizations that provide this as well, but again, this is a community support service. This is an area in which the federal government, through their horizons program, was quite keenly involved, but over time that amount of funding has shifted.
I think the Nova Scotia organization talked about having operational funding. It's not enough to ask organizations to have year-over-year funding and project funding, because then you get into a situation where it's just one project after another, as opposed to knowing that you have the capacity to plan long term for some of these services.