Yes, absolutely.

I'm going to speak a little bit from my day job role.

I am a registered nurse and I work in the core area of Winnipeg. We see on a daily basis how underserved our older adults are. Those are my clients. Those are the people I support. We know that people fare better in our system with supports from family, friends and others advocating for them, but there's a large swath of individuals, both those who are disabled and older adults, who don't have those folks advocating for them, and they're really left to their own devices, so they're missing out on core services and finances and sometimes funding being available to them because they're not able to navigate the system and they don't have the community supports they need to be able to do that.

That's where our program actually comes in and tries to fill in the gaps, but it's not enough and it hasn't been enough for years. For people with disabilities who also live in poverty or for people with disabilities who are over 55 or 65, the communities are not set up to support them. There are actually more barriers than supports in place. They're regularly hearing “no”. A lifetime of hearing “no” or “you don't qualify” or “you're not eligible” gets to be very disheartening.

In the last year, with the pandemic, many of the services that had been in place consistently for these folks disappeared. Now we have individuals who are still living in poverty, who still have disabilities, who are still older adults at higher risk if they do contract COVID, but they are without access to technology and without access to phones. Some of the services are available only with technology. Our province has a wonderful counselling program that it launched and funded really early on in the pandemic, having recognized that mental health concerns are very real concerns. Many of our clients have no ability to access it. Either they don't have the skills to use technology or they don't have the funding to do it. We see that those gaps are significant, and they've widened with the decrease in services.

Transcript

Discussions (0)