What health issue facing Nova Scotians are you most passionate about? Why?
[Transcribed] So recently I've gotten to actually be quite passionate about providing care for the elders in our population. I think this is especially a problem in Nova Scotia. It's a problem in Canada and kind of globally is, you know pop as our population in Canada gets older but at this is especially going to be accentuated in Nova Scotia. I believe we have one of the oldest populations in Canada.
So through covid I think we've seen that that is those kind of the cracks in our long-term care system. And this has been a problem that's been brewing for a long time. I acknowledge that. It's I know Care Homes often refer to staffing issues and funding is also probably an issue.
And I think it says something about kind of our priorities as a society as well. For instance like even in I even in like when it comes to medical school we have I think about 300 geriatric specialists in Canada compared to 3,000 Pediatric Specialists, even though the proportion of our population that is older is has surpassed the population of our population. Sorry the proportion of our population.
And that is Young younger. So I think this is going to start to be a key priority in Nova Scotia specifically. I'm quite passionate about this as well because I'm a sociology student and I'm the TA in a class called gender and health at Dalhousie and recently we just talked about aging and body projects and how our view of Aging the idea that there's a certain way to age. Well, alright, so like engaging
in healthy behaviors and kind of traveling or picking up hobbies and staying active like all those things that are very dependent on class depending on class and depending on being kind of like able-bodied and all those things what I was trying to get at there is that there's like there's this kind of inherent ageism and how we look at aging and so that feeds into why I'm interested in the directions that we're going to go in and providing
care for older folks I think one thing to work on for instance is that and I think this is something that could actually probably bring different politicians and constituents together is that I think a lot of older folks would like to stay at home for as long as possible and so between staying at home if your only options are going into a long-term care home where the problems with those have already been exposed no poor sanitary conditions
So if it's either that or kind of getting Acute Care in a hospital bed, which you know, our hospital system is not really set up for to provide kind of Extended Stays for older folks that don't really have anywhere else to go. I think getting people to stay at home for longer would be an ideal solution here and it's going to be it's going to be you know up to Canadians to decide that end up to Nova scotians to decide that
that that is going to be a priority frankly. I just think there's a moral duty here to care for our older Nova scotians, you know, they have contributed throughout their entire life.
To their province into our society and they really deserve kind of dignity in care.
And and to bring this back to kind of the culture that we have around older folks. That's just what I was trying to get at. The start is that we aren't going to see enough of kind of an impetus to change our system until we have kind of a shift in the culture and realizing that we need to prioritize older folks just as much as we talk about providing care to other people in our society. I also want to address kind of the language that's
It's used around, you know, the silver tsunami and how this aging population is going to put a huge strain on our Healthcare System. I think it's important to remember that we're seeing increased Healthcare use in all segments of our population. And I think again this is feeding into a culture of kind of blame on older folks that is going to really impede thinking of Creative Solutions to care for them. So Rawls is clearly something. I'm pretty passionate about and I really hope that it's
Something that would be addressed in med school if I attended school at Dalhousie. Thank you so much.