Teri MacKay says she doesn’t know how her and her siblings will afford to keep their mom in her private pay space for an extra six months after a jump in the wait time
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Teri MacKay says that when she first moved her 87-year-old mother into a private pay long-term care home in October at the cost of thousands of dollars per month, Fraser Health told her it would be a two-year wait for a publicly subsidized bed.
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Now, however, that wait time has increased to 30 months, and MacKay and her sisters are not sure how they are going to afford to keep their mom Margaret, who has dementia, at a care facility in Surrey for an extra six months at the cost of $9,500 per month.
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She reached out to Postmedia after reading an earlier story about Laura Kelly and her mother Barbara Donaldson, who died in hospital in Victoria at the age of 84 after more than seven months in hospital waiting for a long-term care bed.
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MacKay accused B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne and Premier David Eby of running away from the problem instead of figuring out a way to ensure seniors get what they need.
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“If the funded bed comes in, her cost will be $2,000, and that is doable,” said MacKay. “None of us are capable of looking after her daily needs, and so this is the choice that we had to make for her. She’s been in long-term care since I think it was Oct. 2.”
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Besides the ballooning wait time, one of the problems, says MacKay, is that Fraser Health hasn’t done an assessment on her mother since October when she moved into the care home.
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She says they also replaced her previous case worker, whom the family really liked, with one that Margaret has trouble understanding.
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“It’s a frustrating situation,” said MacKay. “They won’t give you her (wait) number because there’s too many other people who jump the queue because they take a fall. There’s way worse than where my mom is at, and so they used to have a list, a long time ago. But they don’t have that anymore.”
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She and her sister Kari are looking at other facilities that might be affordable, but all the available options in the Fraser Valley cost between $8,000 and $12,000 a month and they don’t want to move their mother out of the Fraser Valley.
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Fraser Health did not respond to a request for comment by Postmedia in time for publication.
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Eby responded to MacKay’s situation Thursday by saying he knows the frustrations British Columbians are facing with the lack of long-term care beds for seniors, but that the reason seven new projects were either put on hold or cancelled is because the costs had spiralled out of control.
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He said the problem of a lack of long-term care beds has been known for decades and that the situation is only going to get more pressing as B.C.’s population continues to age.
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“When we formed government, we committed to build thousands of long-term care beds to respond to that, which we have done. And it is also true that for seven projects we saw remarkable and unacceptable cost escalation to the point of one project being $1.8 million a bed for a senior,” said Eby.
