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Adrian Dix: Health care for seniors is critical

The newly elected leader of the B.C. NDP party held a teleconference last Wednesday and amongst the topics he discussed, senior health care.
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Adrian Dix

The newly elected leader of the B.C. NDP party held a teleconference last Wednesday and amongst the topics he discussed, senior health care.

The issue has been in the spotlight after the recent announcement that Broadacres Care Facility would not receive funding for senior beds from Interior Health and Adrian Dix, who has also served as health critic for the NDP, said that adequate senior health care beds are critical for a community.

“If you can’t provide adequate services for seniors and health care, it’s not just bad for seniors and health care, it’s bad for the economy in communities such as Grand Forks,” Dix said.

“You have to do several things on this; one, obviously, the government said it was going to do 5,000 long-term care beds and then it said it did 800 but the number 800 includes digits and therefore, it should count as much as 5,000. I think that was basically the argument that the government put forward at the time that 800 is close enough to 5,000 in their view – clearly it’s not.”

But Dix also thought there were other problems regarding senior health care as well.

“Clearly we need to address the care bed issue on the one hand and we also have to address the issue of care standards, which are the lowest of any province in Canada, according to Statistics Canada,” the B.C. NDP leader explained.

He said standards were 12 per cent below the Canadian average and 25 per cent below the western Canadian average.

“These are significant failings and I just believe that, and I think people in Grand Forks believe, that we should treat our seniors better than that,” said Dix.

“That’s why I put forward cost-efficient alternatives for health care that would reduce costs in several areas and make the health care system more    efficient.”

He said the government’s approach to health care has been to push people into the most expensive care all the time and not count the distance people have to travel for care.

“Since it’s not a direct government cost, if you have to travel from Grand Forks to wherever for health care, whether it’s Trail, Kelowna or Vancouver, the government doesn’t count that as a cost because it’s not a cost to them,” said Dix, adding that it was clearly a cost to communities and the people who live there.

The opposition leader said that he put forward a proposal to restore rural health care during his leadership campaign because it was a priority to him during his stint as health critic.

“I think it’s critical to our health care system and critical for our economy across the province – that we can provide adequate levels of care across B.C. and the government clearly has a different view,” he said.



Karl Yu

About the Author: Karl Yu

After interning at Vancouver Metro free daily newspaper, I joined Black Press in 2010.
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