The Health Care situation we find ourselves in now was predicted almost two decades ago.
From
2007:
Canada’s looming acute-care crisis
The health-care system is about to embrace the baby-boom generation and a recent symposium at Queen’s University forecast that, at best, the results will be problematic. At worst, our system may implode.
T he health-care system is about to embrace the baby-boom generation and a recent symposium at Queen’s University forecast that, at best, the results will be problematic. At worst, our system may implode.
www.thestar.com
That would have been around the same time we "Boomers" who hired on after high school in the early 1970's had done our 35 years and were retiring, and becoming consumers of health care ourselves.
Since subsequent generations are typically much smaller, the service was experiencing difficulty in recruiting suitably trained replacement staff, just as demand for services was increasing.
In case the link does not open.
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The health-care system is about to embrace the baby-boom generation and a recent symposium at Queen’s University forecast that, at best, the results will be problematic. At worst, our system may implode.
Kingston General Hospital is currently facing an acute shortage of beds. The region was shocked when, after a terrible accident on Highway 401 near Cobourg, the hospital could not accept any victims.
As one doctor told the conference last month:
“How can you have a regional trauma hospital that can’t take accidents from the 401 as the intensive care unit is full and has been for months? How can you have a regional cancer centre if patients can’t get biopsied, let alone treated? (Kingston) is the leading edge of an Ontario disaster.”
There may be specific reasons for Kingston’s plight. One of the underlying causes is that the city has a much higher percentage of seniors than many other communities. But every community in Ontario will soon have many more seniors as the baby-boom generation ages.
If our hospitals are overcrowded today, what will happen when the boomers begin to show up in ever-increasing numbers?
Ten million baby boomers are now between age 40 and 60. Described as a basketball that moves along the python of life, boomers have overwhelmed every set of institutions that marked their passage: First the diaper industry, then schooling, then musical tastes, next housing, and then the job market have all had to cope with a huge scale-up in a short time period.
We are now on the cusp of health care in general, and long-term care and palliative care in particular, facing the same type of pressure.
Statistics Canada, in its 2006 portrait of seniors, paints a picture of what is coming: “The aging phenomenon is gathering speed and over the next 20 years, the number of people over the age of 65 will double. (If) current patterns remain true, at least 2 million of them will require in-home care.”
Judith Shamian, president of the Victorian Order of Nurses, states that boomers will “require decades of chronic care and disease management” and not only because of their demographic impact.
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