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Retired Healthcare Professionals Volunteered To Help During Pandemic

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Photo Credit: Global News

While it is obvious that healthcare workers at the frontline of the pandemic deserve our kudos and gratitude, some unsung heroes should warrant acknowledgment as well. They include thousands of healthcare professionals across the country who have emerged from retirement to offer to redeploy during the COVID-19 crisis.

According to numbers provided to the CBC from the Canadian Medical Protective Association (CMPA), at least 93 doctors in Ontario, who had retired or taken a form of leave, returned to work in direct response to the pandemic.

The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) says nearly 2,000 doctors have also signed up with an app that redeploys them to facilities that need help.

The CMPA offers medical liability protection for doctors who are part of its membership, but many retired physicians or those not practising are no longer members. The Association has, therefore, created a special category for those retired physicians to come back and be able to use the humanitarian type of work category. That category, typically reserved for overseas work, allows for doctors’ memberships to be restored faster and for doctors to get back to work more quickly.

The CPMA said that somewhere between 350 – 400 physicians across Canada have registered with the Association to be protected. These physicians are most likely coming out of retirement to do so. That number could also include doctors on leave. Of that, 93 are physicians in Ontario.

Dr. Todd Watkins, Associate Executive Director at the CMPA, said that the physicians that are coming out of retirement and changing their practice in order to respond is really prompted by their feeling of a call to action. According to Dr. Allyn Walsh, a retired family physician who has picked up shifts at her former clinic: “When you have some skills and some training, you can’t just sort of sit there and twiddle your thumbs while Rome burns.”

Across the country, retired nurses are also answering the call to return to the front lines. CTV reported that workers coming out of retirement could be manning health phone lines in Ontario or helping out with hospital rounds in Nova Scotia – help is needed all over the country.

In Quebec alone, around 10,000 retired healthcare workers responded to the call for aid. It’s a gesture that prompted Premier Francois Legault saying he was proud to be a Québécois in a press conference.

The Globe and Mail reported that a 74-year-old former nurse Marie-Reine Seguin, who retired in Quebec in 2005, is among many who offered her services. Disturbed by the misinformation and panic she saw circulating in her community of Mont-Tremblant, in Quebec’s Laurentians region, she figured she’s well qualified to help with Quebec’s Info-Sante information line, having been part of the original ream that launched it around 1986. She said she was prompted to help after seeing panicked shoppers hoarding toilet paper and spreading misinformation about the virus.

Manitoba was also changing the rules to get former nurses back in hospitals and bolster its healthcare staff before the COVID-19 crisis got worse. The province now lets former nurses apply for an expedited temporary registration during the pandemic. Returning nurses must have been in good standing with the College of Registered Nurses of Manitoba during the last five years, and must be able to safely provide care. Application and registration fees are waived for former registrants applying through this process.

As Canada experiences a third wave of the COVID-19 due to the surge of variants of concern, these unsung heroes are even more needed to help us weather the health crisis as we wait for more people to be vaccinated across the country. So if you’re a retired healthcare professional wanting to help, please take immediate action by contacting your local health authorities or community hospitals. Boomers always want to give back after their retirement, and this is the best opportunity to do so.



AstraZeneca Vaccine: Case Study for Poor Crisis Management

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Photo Credit: bbc.com

When my communications career was budding in New York City in 1983, my then employer Burson-Marsteller, the largest public relations firm in the world, was very proud of being the agency-of-record for Johnson & Johnson in handling crisis communication work for Tylenol. In fact, to this day, the poisoned Tylenol incident in 1982 continue to be a crisis-management teaching model in all communications schools and curriculums around the world.

On September 29, 1982, three people died in the Chicago area after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol at the outset of a poisoning spree that would claim seven lives by October 1. According to Time magazine, by quickly recalling all of its products from the store shelves, a move that cost Johnson & Johnson millions of dollars, the company emerged as another victim of the crime and one that put customer safety above profit. It even issued national warnings urging the public not to take Tylenol and established a hotline for worried customers to call.

The crisis shaped Johnson & Johnson’s public relations strategy from a passive to proactive approach. By skilfully handing the Tylenol crisis, the company completely recovered the market share lost during the crisis and reestablished Tylenol as one of the most trusted over-the-counter consumer products.

Fast-forward 39 years later, the two-dose AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is fast becoming one of the worst examples of crisis management in the history of public relations and pharmaceutical product launches. According to André Picard, health columnist of The Globe and Mail, AstraZeneca is a good vaccine, but a public relations failure. “Its vaccine is robustly effective – 76 percent effective at preventing symptomatic illness. But the company’s repeated missteps have sown confusion and distrust,” he wrote on March 24. His views were echoed by many medical professionals. Lauren Sauer, Johns Hopkins University’s associate professor of Emergency Medicine, said in a Bloomberg Radio interview on April 9 that the company has a “communication problem” rather than a “science” problem.

Here are three public relations missteps that have clouded the shot’s reputation, left governments wary, and exacerbated vaccine hesitancy.

Perception Becomes Reality

AstraZeneca (AZ) has long lost control of its perception among the general public, most of whom are still looking for vaccine solutions in the second, third or fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. The two-dose vaccine, originally developed by researchers at Oxford University, was the first vaccine out of the gate. The problems first started on January 29, 2021 when the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the vaccine for use in all age groups in the EU. On the same day, French president Emmanuel Macron claimed that it was “quasi-ineffective” for people over 65 because the early results of the French clinical trials were not encouraging for the older age group. Following his comments, France’s Health Authority made an official recommendation that the vaccine should not be used for people over 65. It said more studies were needed before it was rolled out to older age groups. Other European countries have taken a similar position: Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, and Poland only recommended it for people under 65, and Italy and Belgium for those under 55. Switzerland – not an EU country – has ruled against approving the vaccine for any age group. The Swiss medical regulator said there was not enough data yet on safety, effectiveness and quality to do so.

The issue for some European countries, acting upon the recommendation from their vaccine advisory bodies, was that they thought not enough of the AstraZeneca clinical trial participants aged over 65 caught the virus to make conclusions on the vaccine’s effectiveness. Other vaccine manufacturers, like Pfizer, included more older people earlier on in their trials, so have more data available. However, the UK (no longer part of the EU) and a number of other countries including India, Mexico and Argentina, have approved its use for all age groups.

So, AstraZeneca’s initial launch in the first quarter of 2021 already sowed doubt and confusion. The COVID-19 vaccine once hailed as “the vaccine to the world” with its low price and easy storage requirements was gradually described as a “second-class” vaccine when compared to the two mRNA vaccines Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Media in Germany reported on front-line essential workers such as firefighters refusing to receive the AZ vaccine because it was abandoned by the old folks.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca developers said at the time that results from a trial of 2,000 adults over 55 in the UK would soon be available, and another trial in the US in older age groups was close to providing data too. It took another three weeks for those trial results to come out and subsequently pointed to enough evidence and data that it is indeed effective for people over 65 after all. However, the damage was already done and the first impression of this vaccine among boomers and senior citizens was not good.

Then came the blood-clot crisis. Ever since March 7, deaths and hospitalisations in several countries around the world as a result of blood clots linked with the AZ vaccine led to governments pausing or changing regulations to only allow the vaccine for people under 55 or even older in some countries. In spite of Health Canada’s updated guidelines saying that blood clots as a result of vaccination are very rare and the vaccine’s benefits far outweigh any risks, Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) is currently reviewing the latest two blood clot incidents in the country – one in Quebec and one in Alberta – and might consider changing the age restrictions yet again.

In the UK, which has ordered 100 million doses of AZ vaccine, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) advised on April 7 that people aged under 30 should be offered alternative vaccines where available, even though its regulatory agency has reviewed the evidence and emphasized that it was not recommending new age restrictions. The most recent blow came from Denmark which has suspended the use of the AZ vaccine all together because the country has several other vaccine options and the infection rates have been coming down.

How did all these incidents affect consumer behaviour? More and more people are perceiving the AZ vaccine as unsafe and they do not want to take the risk of a blood clot no matter how low the probability is. Even with most government officials jabbing their arms with the AZ vaccine on camera, the perception of AstraZeneca as an “inferior” vaccine when compared to Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have unfortunately become a reality. Vaccine shopping is now trending in Toronto where pharmacies in the Greater Toronto Area raised concerns over this weekend about vaccine hesitancy and reported that a lot of AZ vaccines they have in stock are about to expire.

Reactive vs Anticipatory

Amidst all these global crises, what did AstraZeneca the company do to salvage its reputation? The company reacted to each crisis situation by sending out statements explaining next steps but none of them seemed to have registered with anybody. In an interview with the BMJ, one of the world’s oldest medical journals, Ines Hassan, senior policy researcher with the Global Health Governance Programme at the University of Edinburgh, said that AstraZeneca has not fallen short on meeting regulatory requirements. It submitted the necessary data as expected, even though the outdated data submitted to the FDA last month appeared to be a sloppy mistake. However, communication about trial design early in development, and later about the number of patients with COVID-19 symptoms from its primary analysis, could perhaps have been handled better.

According to the BMJ, part of the problem may be that AstraZeneca isn’t a traditional vaccine manufacturer. A number of commentators have raised questions about the experience of the board in communicating some of the challenging messages around vaccines. But the company does have a long history of drug manufacturing and any communications consultant would have told them that prior to a drug or health product launch, a pharmaceutical company must have in place an issues-management plan that anticipates possible issues or crises that might occur; proactively outlines steps to clearly and consistently communicate product benefits and explain the company’s position; and mobilize a group of independent scientists to educate the public on how the drug or vaccine works and saves lives.

Without a proactive communications plan, the company could only react to bad situations blow by blow. In the meantime, its reputation is at stake and its vaccine has lost trust and sown doubts among key stakeholders.

Losing Control

Most companies like to hide their heads in the sand when the first signs of trouble hit. AstraZeneca made the same mistake by letting its COVID-19 vaccine setbacks become non-stop news headlines everywhere since its launch. In addition to issuing reactive press statements, the face of the company has been restricted to its company website. About a month ago, AstraZeneca’s Chief Medical Officer Ann Taylor said in a statement on its website, “Around 17 million people in the EU and UK have now received our vaccine, and the number of cases of blood clots reported in this group is lower than the hundreds of cases that would be reached among the general population.” She then went on to explain how the company went above and beyond the standard practices for safety monitoring and ongoing tests. Ms. Taylor also reaffirmed the company’s commitment that “the safety of the public will always come first.”

The latest update on its website was the company’s response on April 7 to the UK’s and EU’s regulatory bodies’ assessments of extremely rare blood clotting events with low platelets from over 34 million people vaccinated with the AZ vaccine. “Overall, both of these reviews reaffirmed the vaccine offers a high-level of protection against all severities of COVID-19 and that these benefits continue to far outweigh the risks.”

But there are no frequently-asked questions and answers debunking the myths and misinformation out there on the link of blood clots with the vaccine. Posting reactive press releases on its website is not enough to quell public fears and doubts. AstraZeneca needs to take over the megaphone and deploy its global senior science team to deliver the key message that the company’s two-dose vaccine is safe and effective in fighting the pandemic and that its benefits continue to outweigh the risks.

The company also needs to educate global key opinion leaders (KOLs), including epidemiologists, family physicians, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and other trusted voices within a community such as athletes and pastors, on the exact same key message and put the probability of the blood clots into perspective. As Health Canada’s Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Supriya Sharma said, “The chance of developing a blood clot while taking the birth control pill is one in 1,600. The chance of developing one after taking the AstraZeneca vaccine is about one in 250,000.” This is about the same odds as an airplane hitting your house, according to Toronto’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Eileen De Villa.

So far, in countries where the AZ vaccine has been approved, public health officials, including those in Canada, have been reiterating confidence in the AZ vaccine, “Get whatever vaccine is available to you. It’s that simple.” Politicians in Canada, France and Germany have taken a jab of this vaccine in front of TV cameras to demonstrate their confidence in its safety and effectiveness.

But this is not enough. Positive, educational messages need to be repeated like a broken record by the media and KOLs on an ongoing basis before confidence and trust in the vaccine can be rebuilt. At present, some family physicians in Canada are still recommending that their patients wait for a better vaccine alternative than AZ, and pharmacies are raising concern about stockpile of the AZ vaccine about to be wasted due to the lack of takers. Canada is not alone – both Austria and France reported large number of eligible people refusing to take the AZ vaccine. In the meantime, more blood clots might still happen around the world, and every pause or suspension of the AZ vaccine would only exacerbate vaccine hesitancy and unnecessarily prolong the global pandemic. AstraZeneca should take immediate action in improving its global communications or risk becoming a classic case study of poor crisis management.



Grey Divorce On The Rise

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Photo Credit: CNN.com

With all eyes on the recent Bill-and-Melinda-Gates divorce after 27 years of marriage, there is increasing recognition of the rise of “grey divorce,” a term used to describe older couples calling the quits.

According to CNN, the divorce rate for Americans 50 and over has doubled since 1990. In Canada, while divorce rates among younger adults fell by about 30 percent in the last decade, divorce rates for older people have increased slightly through the 1990s and 2000s. The Vanier Institute of the Family, a national research and education organization that conducts research on the diversity and complexity of family life in Canada, said that the increase is nothing as significant as the “grey divorce revolution” in the U.S. In Canada, divorce rates for those aged 50 and older between 2008 and 1991 increased from 4.02 to 5.17 divorces per 1,000 married persons during this period, an increase of 25 percent. In the U.S., divorce rates for this cohort during the same period jumped from 4.87 to 10.05 per 1,000 married persons, an increase of 100 percent.

There has been a change of attitudes towards marriage in the past decade. Years ago, the vast majority of couples who weren’t happy in their relationship chose to remain married out of convenience or routine, or even a sense of familiarity. Over the past few years, however, many are deliberately choosing to part ways.

Couples are not simply “drifting apart” over time anymore. One or both people in the marriage are making an overt choice to change course for the time they have left. Recognizing that life is short and precious, one or both partners choose what they feel is the most fulfilling path. If a marriage is not working for one, they tend to believe that it really isn’t working for their spouse either. So, they create for themselves the space to start a new chapter and regain happiness and fulfilment.

According to Kiplinger, an American publisher of business forecasts and personal finance advice based in Washington D.C., the climbing rate of grey divorce stems from a host of societal factors.

First and foremost, in today’s world women are more empowered and educated and the reduced divorce stigma is giving more women to walk away from a less-than-ideal or emotionally draining situation.

Longer life experiences are also upping the stakes for women who are unhappy in their marriages. Better medical treatments, more healthcare awareness and enlightenment around what will help us live longer have also extended the years spent together in marriage. This ups the ante for those in unhappy marriages and may prompt them to question whether they can put up with their spouse for such a long time.

Other unhappy couples have been putting off divorce until the kids are grown and possibly even starting families of their own. When couples who stay together for the kids are free from their responsibilities of raising children, new light is shed on the relationship, and a late-life re-evaluation of their marriage comes to the forefront of their thinking.

Some baby boomers are on their second, third or even fourth marriages. Research shows that these marriages tend to have lower success rates. The divorce rate for people over 50 who have been married more than once is 2.5 times higher than those who have been coupled with the same person throughout their life.

The in-home quarantine as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic can also be blamed for some of the recent rising divorce rates. The in-home isolation puts a sharper focus on issues in the marriage that may have otherwise been overlooked. Loss of income, employment and separate routines that allowed healthy time away from each other have produced a perfect storm.

Even in Canada where the divorce rates are much lower than those in the U.S., broken marriages are becoming the pandemic’s other toll. The CBC reported that during the pandemic, what would ordinarily be a bump in a regular marriage is amplified. Some couples are seeing a different side of their spouse that they didn’t know existed. That’s leading people to decide their partner is not right for them.

Other couples didn’t know how to deal with the many pressures that the pandemic was imposing on them. If the couple doesn’t know how to deal with that pressure in a way that brings them together, it’s going to pull them apart.

Russell Alexander, a lawyer specializing in separation agreements and divorces, told CBC that his seven family law offices across Ontario have grown by about 30 percent since the pandemic began and they have hired five new lawyers recently to help them with the workload.

According to a national research conducted by Finder Canada, a financial services firm, 12 percent (4.67 million) of Canadian couples have called it quits since COVID broke out last year. Nearly 13 million Canadians say that cabin fever is their most significant stressor during the pandemic. Cabin fever describes psychological symptoms that a person may experience when they are confined to their home for extended periods. Such symptoms may include feelings of restlessness, irritability, and loneliness. Over 50 per of Canadians aged 55 – 64 say they are having the hardest time with it.

Statistics Canada is still crunching the numbers on “changes in relationship status since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic” and said results will be published later this year. There is already anecdotal evidence indicating that not just grey divorces, but the number of “COVID quits” in Canada is indeed on the rise.



Ending The Pandemic Is The Only Priority For This Election

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Photo Credit: CBC.ca

It’s now less than one week prior to Elections Day in Canada, and if you’re still struggling to decide which party to vote for, I would suggest that you stop going through all your usual top issues such as the economy, healthcare and climate change and comparing the parties’ platforms on various policies that might matter to you. Clear the clutter both on your desk and in your head and ask yourself this question: Do you want the pandemic to drag on indefinitely so that unvaccinated individuals would continue to generate new variants that would lead to more lockdowns and overwhelmed hospitals? Do you want to prolong the pandemic to two, three or four more years after 18 months of hunkering down at home, not seeing and hugging your friends and colleagues, and not having as much fun?

If your answer is No, then there is only one party to vote for. The Liberals announced before the election call that the government would make COVID vaccines mandatory for federal public service employees this fall, as well as some workers in federally-regulated industries, including airlines and railways. Commercial air travellers and passengers on interprovincial trains and large marine vessels with overnight accommodations will also have to be vaccinated.

This announcement immediately prompted many financial institutions, municipalities, airlines, train and transit operators, sports event companies, and large corporations in the private sector to immediately put mandatory vaccination in place for its employees and customers.

The Liberals further promise on their platform to spend $1 billion to help provinces and territories bring in proof-of-vaccination credentials in their jurisdictions for nonessential businesses and public spaces. This announcement might not directly lead to Doug Ford’s about-face launch of a vaccine passport system for the most populous province in Canada, but it certainly helps making it a long overdue reality.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, would not demand that federal civil servants and travellers are vaccinated against COVID. Instead, unvaccinated public servants would need to pass a daily rapid test. Canadian travellers would also need to pass a rapid test or present a recent negative test result before boarding a plane, train, bus or ship.

Unfortunately, the only formidable enemy of the virus is a double-dose vaccination, not constant tests. Rapid tests are useful if vaccines are not readily available, but with the current ample supply and accessibility of effective COVID vaccines throughout the entire country, there’s really no excuse just to do the minimal preventive task of testing. The only offence strategy to permanently eradicate the COVID-19 virus is to have everybody vaccinated – 90 percent of the eligible population if not 100 percent.

The NDP also supports mandatory vaccinations for federal public civil servants and workers in federally-regulated industries. However, during the campaign, they naively set a deadline for a mandatory vaccine policy and domestic vaccine passports to be in place by Labour Day. Labour Day has now come and gone, and very little has changed. Did Jagmeet Singh and his team not realize that for somebody to be fully vaccinated, it will take at least two to three months given the required interval of at least 21 – 28 days between the first and second jabs and the minimum duration of two weeks after each shot for the vaccines to effectively trigger the immune system? So setting a deadline of September 6 when campaigning on August 16 was just not achievable. Promising a federal vaccine passport to be used domestically and internationally if elected is also unrealistic. Healthcare policies fall under provincial jurisdictions and even if the provinces allow the Federal Government to issue a domestic vaccine passport, transferring the provinces’ vaccination data to the Federal Government and combining the domestic vaccine passport with an international one good for out-of-Canada travel will just take far too long a time.

As The Toronto Star pointed out, getting vaccinated was never just about protecting one’s individual health, but protecting everyone else, as well. When it turned out that asking politely wasn’t enough to get the vaccination numbers to that critical level of community immunity, making it harder for people to remain unvaxxed logically follows. This is why The Liberals have doubled down on that position during the campaign. They’ve also said they’ll try to shield businesses that impose vaccine mandates on staff or customers from lawsuits.

Contrast that with the Conservatives, who insist mandatory vaccine requirements are a step too far, and Erin O’Toole says he will “respect personal health decisions.” He won’t even require all his own party’s candidates to follow him and get their shots. And his argument that requiring regular testing is an acceptable substitute for mandating vaccines fails the logic test. All testing does is to confirm whether someone has the disease; only vaccines offer any real protection.

Without mandatory vaccinations, the pandemic will never end – which means the economy will not recover because restaurants and non-essential services cannot fully reopen; schools will be shut down again; the fourth wave will be followed by innumerable waves; hospitals will continue to be overwhelmed and life-saving surgeries postponed as happening currently in Alberta and Saskatchewan; people will continue to drive their cars instead of using public transit, thereby hurting the climate even more; workers cannot return to the offices; arts and cultural activities will not be able to resume on a large scale; and nobody could safely travel very far. Under such circumstances, does it really matter what the various party platforms are proposing to improve the economy, child care, climate change, foreign policy, gun control, healthcare, housing, indigenous services, seniors policy, and job creation? None of these good ideas could ever be implemented so long as the pandemic lingers. We will constantly be in a crisis-management mode. So is it not crystal clear what’s the number-one election issue we should be focusing on now and, therefore, which choice to make on September 20?

For further information on the federal parties’ respective platforms, below is a good summary from the CBC:

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/federal/2021/party-platforms/

Happy voting!



Using Technology to Age In Place

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Photo Credit: dreamstime.com

According to a September 2021 poll by Campaign Research, 96 percent of Ontario seniors over age 55 currently plan to remain in their own homes for as long as possible. The Globe and Mail reported that many Canadians watched with panic as long-term care residents bore the brunt of the pandemic, with thousands dying and many forced to isolate for months.

“The pandemic has created an opportunity to rethink a number of different approaches to ageing,” says Dr. Samir Sinha, director of Health Policy Research and co-chair of Ryerson University’s National Institute on Ageing (NIA). “They’re thinking: I don’t want to be one of those statistics on the news,” he said.

Nearly 100 percent of older Canadians recently surveyed plan to live independently in their own homes. Thirty percent don’t feel prepared should they be alone when a medical emergency occurs in their own homes. Close to 80 percent say they have not spoken to their healthcare professionals about what to do if a fall occurs to themselves or a loved one, but 83 percent of Canadians aged 55+ said they are open to receiving advice on how to live safely on their own.

Dr. Sinha is one of the nation’s most renowned gerontologists who is also the director of geriatrics at Sinai Health and University Health Network (UHN). He recently conducted a webinar for close to 800 people on “Practical Technologies that can Enable Ageing in Place” as part of NIA’s Healthy Ageing 101 webinar series.

As older Canadians, more so than ever before, want to maintain their independence as they age and live at home for as long as possible, they will face a growing risk for falls, and other medical or health emergencies that can occur at home, threatening their long-term health and independence. Dr. Sinha said older adults and their families are, in general, open to receiving advice on how to age well in their own homes, but are not asking for advice from their primary or other regular care providers. According to him, most healthcare providers are not aware of the rapidly evolving technology solutions, and what to consider recommending, that can better enable their patients and their families to age in place. This last point he made, in particular, was surprising and worrisome.

Dr. Sinha pointed out that falls are the leading cause of injury-related hospitalizations among Canadians 65 years and above. He said 25 percent of older Canadians have vision problems, including cataracts and glaucoma, and hearing problems that can impact day-to-day tasks that require focus and balance.

Other health conditions such as diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, as well as dementia, acute illnesses and a lack of exercise can make maintaining one’s balance and mobility more difficult. Clutter and other tripping hazards, poor lighting, not using gait aids, and using several medications can all increase one’s risk of falling.

Dr. Sinha then provided some chilling statistics relating to falls. One in three older Canadians fall each year; and one in three falls result in serious injuries. Four in five hospitalizations due to injuries amongst older persons are because of a fall. Forty percent of falls treated in hospitals involved fractured hips. Most importantly, half of all falls occur at home. If a person has fallen in the past six months, the likelihood of them falling again is high in the near future. The annual cost of falls alone to Public Health is a warping $2.3 billion.

A 2008 BMJ study published by the British Medical Association found that 82 percent of falls occurred when the person was alone. Eighty percent of those who fell were unable to get up after at least one fall. And a disturbing 30 percent had lain on the floor for an hour or more after they fell.

The last part of Dr. Sinha’s presentation focused on understanding the practical technologies that can enable ageing in place. A lot of them are already common knowledge if one is well informed, but they are still good reminders. Smart phones, virtual healthcare, remote health monitoring, fitness trackers or smart watches, smart home devices, and personal emergency response services (PERS) are all useful supportive technologies for older people who want to stay at home instead of going to a long-term care facility or a retirement home.

Most people are probably already familiar with the first five technologies, so I will elaborate more on PERS. These kind of services usually involve an electronic hardware, for example, a pendant, a bracelet, or a smart watch worn on a person with a help button to initiate an alert. The hardware is connected to an emergency response centre and dispatch of help. Advanced features include a fall detection and GPS tracking, and some allow two-way voice interaction if a user can’t reach a phone.

Dr. Sinha said that studies have reported positive health impacts of PERS in terms of gaining faster assistance in an emergency situation and preventing additional complications; extending the time users are able to remain living at home; increasing users’ sense of security; and reducing anxiety about falling, and increasing confidence in performing everyday activities and managing unpredictability.

Four PERS options were suggested in the webinar. They include LivingWell Companion by TELUS Health (starting at $15 per month); PHILIPS Lifeline (starting at $36 per month); LifeAssure (starting at $29.99 per month); and Galaxy MedicalAlert (starting at $29.95 per month).

Of course, as always, prevention is better than cure. Apart from having the right supportive technologies, Dr. Sinha suggested that older people should ask their primary healthcare providers or close family members to assess their risks for falls and other hazards around the home. They need to stay active with at least 150 minutes of exercise per week to strengthen muscles, increase stability, improve one’s mood, prevent dementia, and maintain one’s overall health. They should also use digital supports and services that keep them connected to loved ones, the community and care services.

Dr. Sinha and other gerontologists in Ontario can conduct house calls to patients via a program called OT Home Safety Assessment to assess the risks of falls for older people at home. But patients will first need to ask their family doctors to write a referral before such house visits can take place. For more information on preventing falls or to view the webinar, please contact the NIA at info.nia@ryerson.ca. The entire presentation by Dr. Sinha is also available for viewing on YouTube.





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