A Tale of Two Cities: Seniors’ Housing and Health Care in Calgary and Vancouver
Posted by kmancer on April 6th, 2010
I’ve just come back from Calgary. Every time I visit that city I am always struck by the differences between the seniors’ housing market there and the seniors’ housing market here in Vancouver. The projects all look the same, basically, the big difference is the amount of personal care provided in most Calgary projects. There are a few that cater only to people who require hospitality services (meals, housekeeping, laundry), but the majority provide extensive personal care services, most of which is paid for by Alberta Health Services. Some places provide up to four hours of care per day. In Vancouver, care at this level would never be found outside the doors of a residential care facility.
And it’s all due to policies of the Alberta government, which is placing a very heavy emphasis on caring for frail seniors in places other than nursing homes. In complete contrast, the BC government funds nothing other than nursing homes, although for a few years they too espoused the merits of assisted living as something of a substitution model for long term care. But that was then and this is now.
The Alberta model is probably cheaper, at least for the government, although questions have been raised about that. From the perspective of seniors themselves, the model results in much more mixing of frail and less frail people than you would find in most Vancouver projects. That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. I will come back to this subject in a later post.
Tags: Aging in place, Housing Development, Housing Options, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing
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on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Senior Housing.
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