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Ombudsperson speaks in Castlegar about senior's care UPDATE

BC Ombudsperson Kim Carter was in Castlegar on Thursday to talk about health care for seniors in the province.
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BC Ombudsperson Kim Carter speaks Thursday at the Castlegar Complex about senior's care in the province.

BC Ombudsperson Kim Carter was in Castlegar on Thursday to talk about health care for seniors in the province. Carter talked about the recommendations she made in a report to the Ministry of Health. The report featured 143 findings and 176 recommendations and focused on areas such as home and community care issues, home support, assisted living and residential care.

"It was a very large report we delivered," she said. "It was over 450 pages. We looked at all significant areas of home and community care for seniors. We looked into the processes in place to ensure people are treated fairly and reasonably."

The two areas the report focussed on was: providing people with useful, timely information and insuring that services are accessible; and establishing clear, consistent province-wide standards and monitoring them to ensure they are met and enforcing them if they are not met.

"Very much at the moment, I have a focus on making sure information is provided to people," said Carter. "People are being asked to make very difficult decisions in short time frames. The very least that can be done is to ensure they have the information they need about residential care facilities, about costs, about what services they can expect, and how long they can expect to wait. This is all important information that is not readily available at the moment."

The ombudsperson has visited several other BC communities such as Nelson, Qualicum, Prince George, Quesnel, and Williams Lake  as part of an informal tour.

The ombudsperson is an officer of the legislature like the auditor general and the representative for children and youth. Carter was appointed in 2006 by the legislative assembly on the recommendation of a multi-party committee.

"A number of the questions I received in Nelson and Castlegar focused on home support and the range of services and the amount of time that was assigned to complete certain tasks," said Carter. "I had a couple of questions where people were interested in the recommendations we made in our report that there be consistent province-wide reasonable time frames to achieve certain tasks in home support. Other questions that were more numerous dealt with residential care and the issues of the standards and people feeling that they needed clear standards so they knew that they could complain if those standards weren't being met and that they would get a response and essentially the standards would be upheld."