Crisis in Long Term Care Continued # 3 - Elder Caring Inc.
Younger adults. I worked with a 42 year old gentleman who lived with a degenerative motor disease. He could no longer live on his own and spent several years under Alternate Level of Care (ALC) status in a hospital. This is not a new issue and the Toronto Star wrote an article highlighting some of the challenges.
Residents with behavioral difficulties. As highlighted in last week’s blog, over 40% of residents exhibit aggressive behaviours stemming from their cognitive condition. There is not enough staff and/or they are not equipped/able to actively problem solve and explore the reason for the outbursts and intervene in a helpful way. Simply put, there is not the time to understand the A,B,C’ of someone’s behaviour (A= antecedent, B= behaviour itself and the C=consequence). There are a handful of settings that are specifically designated to accommodate those with significant behaviourial challenges but again, there simply are not enough spaces to accommodate. There were previous concerns regarding the high number of residents who were on anti-psychotic medications. Health Quality Ontarioreported in Ontario in 2017 that almost 23% of LTC residents are on this medication without a diagnosis of psychosis. This is an improvement from the 2015 data that documented 27% of residents were being given this medication.
LGBT community has also had to provide specialized training to staff however other residents may not all be so welcoming.
Securing a linguistic and culturally appropriate setting can also be very difficult. For many in the later stages of dementia, they revert back to their mother tongue. While we are an ethnically/linguistically diverse community, it seems that many of those working within these facilities do not share these language skills.