By Ethan Baron, The Province
First came the Baby Boom. Now comes the Grey Wave. Forecasts of an overwhelming tide of seniors washing over Canada's health-care system have been well publicized, but a new development in Vancouver shows the tsunami is already starting to hit, pitting the vulnerable against the vulnerable in a competition for health services.
In the past two years, the need for mental-health care among elderly people in the Vancouver Coastal Health region has jumped 23 per cent, the health authority says.
The necessity to provide those services has now taken its first casualties: 350 younger patients suffering mental illnesses.
Those outpatients have received notice that the West Side Mental Health Team facility that served them will be given over this summer to elderly mental patients.
The younger group must choose another of three nearby outpatient facilities. The teams of professionals who served them will be broken up, and patients will lose the well-knit community of staff, family members and fellow patients who have supported them.
"For people with persistent mental illness, they need consistency in terms of recovery and trying to be well," says Michael Crain, 36, a bipolar patient who attends the West Side Team facility on Cambie Street at King Edward Avenue.
"With all this instability, it's also causing a lot of stress. It's such a wonderful, warm place, and it's such a shame that this community is going to be lost."
Patients receive therapy and coaching on how to deal with their illnesses and function in society, as well as referrals for medication and other health services. The space provides heavily used computers and a kitchen where patients learn to cook for themselves.
Staff are familiar with the patients, and help each other with them, creating "this sense of everybody looking out for one another," Crain says.
Vancouver Coastal spokesman Gavin Wilson says the health authority isn't cutting services. "We're just trying to be more efficient," he says.
Aging British Columbians are putting more pressure on the health system by the day, says Alan Davidson, associate professor of health studies at the University of B.C.'s Okanagan campus.
But the Grey Wave need not bring health-care catastrophe, Davidson says. Japan and European countries that experienced the surge earlier have coped without significant service reduction or economic damage.
It just takes money, and the public and political will to raise it and spend it on health care, he says.
"You're not going to have the public programs unless you have the wherewithal to pay for them," Davidson says.
Boosting health spending to match the growing need from aging British Columbians conflicts with the low-tax ideology of the provincial Liberal government, he says.
The tug-of-war over services is starting and, increasingly, it's our seniors who will suffer for it.
