Home is Where the Heart Failure Treatment Is
Heart failure is a preventable and manageable chronic health condition that remains a leading cause of death and driver of health care costs in Canada.
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Volunteers: Critical Team Members in the Care of Older Patients
When older patients are hospitalized, they benefit from care provided by a variety of professionals: physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers, and others. At Sinai Health System, older patients are also additionally supported by another group of unique team members: volunteers.
If You’re Going to Get Older, Do It Now!
Today is National Seniors Day and there has never been a better time to be an older Canadian. Today, older Canadians are living happier, healthier, and longer lives than their counterparts in previous decades.
Transforming Summer Students into Future Leaders in Geriatrics Care
One of the major challenges to improving the care of older patients is the availability of health human resources trained in providing appropriate care to the elderly. With only about 250 geriatricians currently available to support 5 Million older Canadians, there are not enough geriatricians – let alone other types of Canadian physicians and other health care professionals – with the appropriate knowledge and skills to provide holistic, person-centred care to our rapidly ageing population.
Chronic Pain: A Common Health Condition We Don’t Talk About Enough
While many of the most common chronic health conditions among older adults are well-managed, one of the most common health issues older adults face remains elusively underdiagnosed and undertreated. Chronic pain is another health condition that older adults often face but can typically be left untreated.
Avoiding the Hazards of Hospitalization by Bringing the Hospital Home
If you imagine that the body is a machine, and illness represents its breakdown, then hospitalization can be considered a significant attempt to repair it when something serious happens. When providing care for older patients, this disease-centred thinking, however, is too narrow and will therefore produce limited results. When older adults are hospitalized, it can unfortunately set them on a greater path of declining health and reduced functional abilities often caused inadvertently by what many in health care refer to as the ‘Hazards of Hospitalization’.
Ageing Around the World: The Asian Tiger is Ageing as Fast as Our Canadian Polar Bears
It’s often said that one of Canada’s fundamental challenges is too much space, too few people. This makes organizing health care services in less urban locations difficult, and with our older rural-dwelling adults seeking to age in place, providing home and community care services to support them will be a hurdle overcome by particularly creative policy solutions.
Let’s Talk About Late Life Depression
Every year on January 31st, Canadians across the country engage in conversations online and in their communities about how mental health affects their neighbours, colleagues, loved ones and themselves. As many of us have come to understand, breaking the stigma around mental wellness through open conversation is an important first step toward making mental health supports and treatment easily accessible to Canadians who could benefit from them.
In 2018, Let’s Remember the Progress We’ve Made in Reducing Dementia
For many of us, 2017 was a watershed year. Canada’s 150th year also became its first in our history when the numbers of Canadians over the age of 65 started to outnumber those under the age of 15. This reality has woken many people up to the fact that we need to pay more attention to the needs and challenges of our ageing population. Among the most discussed of these is the need to support older adults with dementia and their families.
Hitting the Books to Meet the Needs of our Ageing Population
Over the last month, children all across Canada have continued a time-honoured tradition of going back to school in the fall to gain knowledge and skills that will serve as the building blocks of their lives. However, even though this happens every year, it seems we only think that it’s younger Canadians who need to go back to school.