Barbados is being encouraged to have more home health care of the elderly. 

This was one major point among many coming out of a panel discussion on women and public health at the National Union of Public Workers headquarters recently. 

The audience included several project participants in the Public Services International (PSI) International Migration and Women Health Workers Project, which seeks to deal with the migration of nurses and health care workers as well as ways of ensuring workers rights. 

One project partner, Anne-Marie DeLorey, noted that in Canada there is great push from outside countries including from the South of us, to increase the numbers of private healthcare facilities. What we see as important is that the sending countries invest in their public health-care systems. 

DeLorey, Advocacy Staff Representative for the British Columbia Government and Service Employees Union, also encouraged Barbados to adopt more home healthcare programmes for the elderly. She cited a Canadian survey that showed providing support to the elderly in their homes can decrease a number of costs to the system both personal and financial. 

DeLorey revealed that a cut by the Canadian Government to Home Care support healthcare provided not by nurses but by community-trained healthcare workers in the residences of the elderly, showed a 25 per cent increase in seniors going to use emergency care, because their health had decreased immensely without the home health care programmes. The study also showed ten per cent increase in the deaths of seniors in areas where the programme was cut. 

In November of 2004, Tennyson Springer, Director of the QEH and Dr Brian Charles, Head of the Accident and Emergency (A&E) told the Barbados Advocate that the abandonment of elderly persons, as well as elderly persons coming to the A&E department for care was reducing the efficiency of the department. 

Springer stated that QEH was seeing between nine and 11 cases of elderly abandonment, or social cases per year. He explained that the result of this is that the A&E department, an acute care facility, has to house, feed and bathe chronic cases, reducing the efficiency of the department. 

When the Barbados Advocate contacted Dr Charles, yesterday he explained that the problem is a perennial one, with elderly persons abandoned at Crop-Over and Christmas time. However, Charles stated that the problem is not as rampant as it has been in the past due in part to work from the Ministry of Health, as well as home care of the elderly in private nursing homes and the geriatric hospital. 

Charles said that he absolutely believed that without the present home health care from the public and private institutions even more elderly persons would be coming to his department. 

However, DeLorey stated that care in the actual homes of the elderly was found to be a much cheaper way of support as opposed to 24 hour care whether in a long term care facility such as in a nursing home, or in a hospital.