Empowering seniors and older adults
The work we are doing is exciting, life-altering, and life-saving.
We are leading the charge to transform care for seniors and older adults.
But we simply cannot do it without you. We invite you to come along on our journey and help ensure seniors – an important, yet often-neglected, part of our population – receive the care they need and deserve.
Your support will have a profound and lasting impact on seniors, older adults, and their families across BC.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Older adults and families have struggled long enough. We must enact change right here, right now.
For decades, our health care services have focused on extending the length of life, but have paid little attention to enriching the quality of life.
We’re not just living longer, we’re coping with the tangled challenges that come with aging, including complex medical needs, illness, frailty, and social and cognitive challenges. Case in point: 80% of residents in long-term care have some form of dementia, and over a third of seniors are currently facing two or more chronic health conditions.
- Seniors make up almost 20% of our population.
- During this decade, more than five million Canadians will turn 65.
- Right now, more than 11,000 Canadians are over the age of 100.
This means that residents entering acute or long-term care today, and in the future, will likely require more complex, multidisciplinary care than ever before.
With your help, we can give older adults the opportunity to live not only long lives, but also to enjoy ones that continue to bring joy and meaning as they age.
As part of our commitment to putting people first, we will centre care around the needs and wants of patients and residents. And we will empower them and their families to direct how they would like to be cared for and supported.
You are our partner in this vision. With your support, we will build on our 130 years of expertise and transform the way seniors and older adults receive care in BC. Together, we will enhance their quality of life, and enable them to live as full and meaningful lives as possible.
Centre for Healthy Aging
A brand new approach for a life well-lived.
No more silos, compartmentalization, or getting lost in the system.
The Centre for Healthy Aging, which will be attached to the new St. Paul’s Hospital, offers older adults services that are tailored to their needs, better supporting them to live well in the community and stay comfortable at home for as long as possible.
It will be one of only three medical units with street access, located adjacent to the new hospital’s main atrium on the ground floor, making it easy and safe for patients and their families to find it, walk in, and self-refer.
The Centre for Healthy Aging will:
- Help older adults enjoy a higher quality of life by addressing issues like long wait lists, and disjointed, singularly focused medical appointments
- Address the complex medical, social, functional, and cognitive needs of each individual, while honouring their unique goals and values
- Create an efficient and streamlined hub for older adults to access the supports and services they need, when they need it
- Offer patients easy access to imaging, pharmacy, rehabilitation, and other services
- Include an on-site mobility gym and an “activities of daily living suite” that will enable occupational therapists and rehabilitation specialists to assess patients’ ability to perform everyday tasks, such as cooking, toileting, and laundry, and their suitability to be discharged from hospital and/or to continue living at home
Once the Centre for Healthy Aging model is proven successful at the new St. Paul’s Hospital, we plan to replicate it and establish similar centres across the province to meet the unique needs of older adults in each community.
With you as our partner, we can ensure seniors and older adults feel empowered, enjoy a higher quality of life, and receive the specialized, compassionate care they need, when they need it.
“I feel this is my second home. Everyone knows my name and really cares about my husband, and he’s content. The staff are like angels that have a built-in radar system. I’m very attached to the other residents and staff. They have become my family and are very much filling the void in my life.”
Judi Wild-Hutter
whose husband, Lorne, is a resident at Providence Living at The Views
Providence Living at The Views
Help our seniors with a different, better way to live.
Today’s institutionalized model of seniors care is fraught with challenges. Here in BC and across the country, seniors and others living in long-term care have experienced a system that overemphasizes their medical conditions to the detriment of their social-relational needs.
There has never been a more important time to enact change. In the past five years alone, the public long-term care waitlist has more than doubled in BC.
We must move away from today’s traditional practices of hospital care to a model that provides the person-centred and holistic care residents need and deserve: Home for Us. When we empower residents, improve their quality of life, and provide care in a home-like setting, we enhance their well-being and boost the satisfaction of their families and caregivers.
Providence is the first to bring the care village model into public long-term care, making it affordable and accessible for everyone. And our first-of-its-kind research study will help refine and improve the model as we build more care villages across the province.
Every move we make toward this transformative model of care is a gesture to every senior and older adult that they are highly valued and important members of society.
With your help, we can continue to improve the care and research that gives seniors and residents the opportunity to experience a dramatic shift in their everyday lives. Your generosity can drive us forward in this transformation in care, and empower older adults to live life to the fullest.
So many lives depend on your support, and so many lives will change for the better as a result. Please join us as we embark on this important and far-reaching journey that will initiate enduring changes in seniors care in BC, and across Canada.
Older adults deserve better when it comes to health care. By adopting a new model in both acute and long-term care – one that places patients and residents at the centre – we can further improve care that promotes health, is respectful, and preserves dignity.
Your support will ensure we provide compassionate, person-centred care to everyone who needs it, and enable British Columbians to stay healthy, active, and independent for as long as possible.