Society must alter 'pervasive prejudice around aging'

Deborah Van den Hoonaard says changing the words society uses regarding seniors would be a good start to fixing the issues of nursing home fees and crowded hospital wards.

Van den Hoonaard, a St. Thomas University professor and a Canada research chair in qualitative research, says seniors are thought of as children and points to language used recently by Social Development Minister Cathy Rogers, who used the term "our seniors."

Van den Hoonaard says that smacks of ageism.    

"Adults are not considered 'ours,' so it's kind of condescending and demeaning and that's troubling to me," Van den Hoonaard says.

She says it's hard to find a good word right now because there are so many negative connotations to getting older.  

"We have a pervasive prejudice around aging. We really worship youth," she says.

"Even things like suggesting that people don't really have to get old. Age is just a number or it doesn't really matter. All of those things reflect our fear of aging. We tend to think of people of old people as all alike. Prejudice always requires us to think of a group as all alike."

The professor says people are living longer than before.

"This is a tremendous accomplishment of our society," says Van den Hoonaard.

"Societies in the past could only dream of having lots of old people in them. Our society has succeeded in having older people and it terrifies us."  

We don't value old people as they should be valued. We need to rethink our approach to taking care of seniors.- Deborah Van den Hoonaard

She says once society changes the way it talks and thinks about seniors than some of the issues can be resolved.

For example, she says why not create jobs for young new New Brunswickers to help older people stay in their homes longer. Why not solve some of the province's unemployment problem by putting younger people in charge of making sure their elders live fulfilling lives.

She is also concerned that recent changes target women even if that wasn't the intention because the majority of people in nursing homes are women.

"It really is targeting women, although we don't say it out loud," she says.

Van den Hoonaard has studied widows and their lives and she's found that many of the ones who live in nursing homes are often there because they have outlived their husbands.

"They've contributed so much already and then they become unfairly targeted," she says.

Keeping seniors out of nursing homes

Right now, Van den Hoonaard says society talks about issues as though it is trying to plug holes.

Van den Hoonaard says older New Brunswickers should not be spending their final years in large institutions or hospital hallways.

"The nursing home is not a very successful place to go, it's not as if it's a solution for people," she says.

She says older people are better served by staying in their homes or in smaller communities.

She also says society underpays the people who give homecare and that people should look at that vocation as a way to employ more young New Brunswickers.

She says giving private corporations millions of dollars to care for seniors is not the right thing to do as a society.

"We don't value old people as they should be valued. We need to rethink our approach to taking care of seniors," she says.

Van den Hoonaard says the first thing that has to go when talking about issues facing older people is to take money out of the equation.

"What kind of society do we want to have. What is the right thing to do and we'll figure out the money later," she says.

"If we start with the money, we will never get the right answer. We will always do Band-Aids, we will always cut, we will always underpay homecare workers, we will not have a solution."