The Alberta government has launched a seniors lodge review panel that will look to make the most of existing spaces and help ensure seniors can age in their community.
Jason Nixon, minister of Seniors, Community and Social Services, explained how the government was following up on its election and post-election commitment to review all aspects of the Seniors Lodge Program.
“Everything is on the table, and ultimately, the goal is to make sure we continue to have a seniors lodge program that will work going in the next couple of decades and that we end up with good community spaces for seniors to call across Alberta, which would include rural Alberta,” Nixon said in an interview with the Fitzhugh.
The Seniors Lodge Program is Alberta’s oldest affordable housing program for seniors and supports 10,850 lodge units in 149 lodges across the province.
The program provides services to residents, including meals, laundry, housekeeping and recreational programming.
The government-led panel will be co-chaired by MLA for Leduc-Beaumont Brandon Lunty and president of the Alberta Seniors and Community Housing Association (ASCHA) Arlene Adamson.
The panel also consists of municipal representatives, social housing and seniors organizations.
Specifically, the panel will look at ways to make the lodge program more sustainable, ways to utilize existing infrastructure and ways that Alberta should be building or renovating infrastructure.
“The other big thing is we're really looking at how our lodge program works with the overall health care system, particularly the continuing care system and the [Ministry] of Health to make sure that we're interacting with them appropriately, but everything is on the table,” Nixon said.
Nixon noted that Alberta is projected to have over a million seniors by 2035.
“So clearly, we have aging challenges, which we knew was coming as the baby boomer generation age,” he said.
“But we got to make sure that what we build keeps care of that generation now but also does not saddle future generations with a bunch of infrastructure and debt that would not be needed, because as fast as it goes up, it goes down pretty quick.”
The panel is expected to complete its work before the summer.
The lodge program was last reviewed in 2015.
