Cost of aging population set to explode: report

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – The cost of caring for our aging population is expected to explode over the next 30 years, with the Conference Board of Canada predicting spending will hit $177-billion by the 2046.

A new report warning about the future of senior care in Canada points to a looming healthcare labour shortage and a dramatic increase in the reliance on unpaid or volunteer caregivers unless governments start to plan now.

The Conference Board says more than five million Canadians took time to care for a senior in 2011 and that number is predicted to jump to 11.6 million people by 2046. “We know today that unmet and undermet needs are real and we also know today that the number of unpaid caregivers we rely on, in the context of aging, is unsustainable,” says Louis Theriault, vice president of public policy for the board.

“Acute care is still very important, but demand is growing even faster around care for seniors and that is not happening in a hospital, it is happening at home,” he tells NEWS 1130. “It’s not necessarily healthcare needs; it’s all the supportive living that is needed to age well at home.”

Theriault says their forecast has pressing implications for public spending, the labour market, and housing and institutional infrastructure. “We need to rethink the system, which has largely been driven by the needs of the 1950s and 1960s when the population was much younger and when acute care was a central part of how healthcare was supposed to be,” he says.

“Now we are in a different world with chronic disease management, we are aging, and there are specific healthcare needs. How that huge healthcare budget gets reallocated in the context of different needs and different priorities is the fundamental question.”

Theriault says increased funding isn’t the solution — the report suggests that “responding to these needs in an efficient and sustainable manner will require collaboration among the diverse mix of public and private stakeholders that make up the continuing care sector.”

“We are already spending more than the average western European countries and OECD countries, and in terms of various outcome measures, we are not getting the value for the money,” he argues.

The good news is, the Board believes there is time to plan for the future needs of our seniors. “This is the first diagnosis made that clearly defines all these issues and puts a number on them to see how they evolve over time,” says Theriault. “It’s a strategic tool to start planning infrastructure needs and human resource needs.”