Seniors should have more personal control over medical treatments
By Medicine Hat News Opinon on December 1, 2017.
Alberta has systems in place for seniors who need care and the systems may be working well on many levels but it is time to take a look at the impact on the people affected. The News hears regularly from seniors and/or their families who express a feeling of having lost all control over what is happening to them after they end up in hospital. Even if you have been living independently, once you need to be admitted to hospital for medical treatment it often feels as though it is all out of your hands. The senior will be assessed to determine the level of care they would need to live outside of hospital. That could mean/feel as though someone else decides whether you can or cannot return to your own home and whether you need to be placed in a seniors’ residence. There is plenty of value in this assessment process in that it identifies the needs of the senior. The process also helps to protect the medical system staff who are responsible for the senior’s care in hospital. In general, non-senior adults are given a lot of say over medical treatment. If you are diagnosed with an illness you are presented with options for treatment and perhaps even a recommendation from the physician. You then decide what course of treatment you want, which could include the option of refusing all treatment. Parents have the say over treatment for young children and increasingly as a society we are giving adolescents a bigger voice in what they want in terms of medical care/treatment for a serious illness. When it comes to seniors, however, a testing procedure/assessment is administered to determine level of care needed and this dictates whether the senior will ever see their own home again. It is true some seniors, especially if they are dealing with a medical issue that has had a significant impact on them, are perhaps not thinking clearly and will find a decision hard to make. Not much is easy at that stage in life. There must always be safeguards in place for the senior but perhaps we should give them some degree of control. Perhaps they should have a say in whether they go home, even if it is not ideal. Perhaps they would rather struggle in their own home and die sooner than be subjected to treatment they do not want in a foreign environment. When family members are present to give input this should also be appreciated and taken into account not only on whether their loved one should be allowed to return to their own home but on medical care options too. It is ideal if a senior has already given written approval for a family member to make decisions for them. This is not always possible. Some seniors do not have a close relationship with a family member they feel they can trust. Other seniors simply do not have any family here or anywhere else. If we do not rethink our way of handling seniors we will end up with more and more seniors simply refusing to allow any sort of home care into their home for fear of it triggering a change of events over which they have no control. If they refuse to seek medical treatment for the same reason we will have gained nothing in terms of protecting seniors and it will become increasingly clear that we are a very uncaring society when it comes to elders, who should be cherished and appreciated. (Gillian Slade is a News reporter. To comment on this and other editorials, go to https://www.medicinehatnews.com/opinions, email her at gslade@medicinehatnews.com or call her at 403-528-8635.) 14-13
