Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs Minister Hon. Moses Jn Baptiste, says the ministry has been working alongside a local consultant to revive the Elderly Care policy which has been in drafts for decades.
He says the aim of the completion of the Elderly Care Unit is to change how older people are being treated in Saint Lucia.
“My major duty is to cause over time, there to be a change in the way Saint Lucians generally treat old people.” the minister says.
“The first draft of the report was presented last week, we are going to have a unit which the department of public service hopefully will approve in a couple weeks. And we are going to have officers who will be working solely on our elderly issues.”
“We are looking at health services, the public services and families. There are lots of families who really don’t know how to treat their elderly relatives.”
The minister says the country is faced with the frustrations of families not knowing how to care for their elderly relatives who may have Dementia, Alzheimer’s or certain challenges.
“Increasingly we are seeing a number of families abandoning their elderly relatives at the hospitals it might surprise you to know, that we have several elderly people who are just living at the hospitals because their relatives …probably when they came in they gave us the wrong address and the wrong telephone number, so when we are trying to contact the relatives no one knows who these people are all of a sudden.”
The health minister sites the lack of access to public health care, lack of proper care for the elderly and the high number of elderly people being abandoned at hospitals are some key area of concerns for the ministry.
Jn Baptiste says, the hope is to approach matters dealing with elderly care differently and to change the overall outlook on elderly care.
“We want to see a different face, a different kind of approach to dealing with matters relating to elderly people in Saint Lucia but we want to do it in a systematic way. That is why we are working with our local consultant, we are towards the end of this now and you will be hearing a lot when we have employed our elder care specialist at the ministry and this is coming very soon.” he says.
Photo: thevoiceslu.com
