It was exactly the reaction Jim Scott wanted — the confirmation he needed that he was on the right track with his model of care for seniors.
Scott, the founder of Home Solutions for Seniors Care Inc., had just matched an elderly woman with a family in Durham. A single mother and her four daughters would soon be welcoming the senior into their home, to live and be looked after, akin to foster care.
It wasn’t only ideal for the elderly woman, who wasn’t ready to move into a long-term care facility or able to afford retirement home fees. Welcoming the woman into their home completed the family, Scott said.
“The 12-year-old (daughter), right out of her mouth, it was ‘Sir, are you bringing Grandma today?’ The mom, for her, it was a companion,” Scott recalled.
With successful launches of the Home Solutions for Seniors Care model in the Greater Toronto Area and Brockville, Scott has Niagara in his sights — a place of long wait lists for nursing home beds, retirement community vacancies and affordable seniors housing — as the next aging community needing a creative senior care alternative.
“Given the issues in long-term care over the years, we figured there was a need for alternative professional family care,” Scott said.
In each community the home-care program has been established, Scott and Home Solutions recruit local personal support workers, registered nurses or registered practical nurses willing to foster one or two seniors in their homes.
Scott said the model allows health-care workers the chance to provide the type of individual, focused care they have been trained to give but, in an overloaded health-care system, may not always be able to do.
Like a foster family situation, the caregivers are paid $2,000 to $3,500 a month, depending on the needs of the seniors and the services provided within the home.
The seniors, who pay for their care, become members of the family, stay active in their community and feel valued, Scott said.
The care model is targeted at seniors whose own families may not be able to take them in and who are at that in-between stage of needing assisted living accommodation but not ready for a nursing home.
“We believe long-term care has a place for seniors, but there are families and seniors that don’t want that choice and this is another option. It really is a home away from home,” Scott said.
“A lot of seniors going into long-term care feel they are going there to die. Our message is it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Families and seniors are paired based on needs and personalities. A registered nurse, part of the Ontario Network of Prevention of Elder Abuse, visits prospective homes for an assessment.
All foster families go through police checks. Families and seniors meet beforehand to help determine matches, too.
With 27 years’ experience in social services and fostering children, Scott said he can determine quickly whether a senior will mesh with a particular family.
The hope is to have many local families offering their homes so that seniors have a choice, he said. An information session will be held in St. Catharines in the new year.
Scott and Home Solutions provides necessary supports to caregiver families, including regular visits by Home Solutions staff, so families aren’t working in isolation.
Scott said the agency accepts referrals from local community care access centres, the organizations responsible for funding long-term care in their jurisdictions.
To launch the program in Niagara, Scott has partnered with the Guardian Angels Program, a seniors advocacy group founded by Niagara-on-the-Lake resident Betty Miller. The group was borne out of concerns Miller had about the care her mother Edna received in nursing homes before Edna died in 1999.
Miller said she wished Scott’s care model had been option for Edna.
“Now there is a true alternative,” to nursing homes, she said.
For more information, visit www.hsscare.com.
Tiffany Mayer/QMI Agency-The Tribune
