On Monday, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley will present her 2024-2025 Budgetary Proposals as an eager nation awaits word on how her measures are likely to impact them financially and socially.
Managing a country is a weighty responsibility, but it was one that she and her team requested of the Barbadian public in 2018 and again in 2021. In both cases, she received historically overwhelming support in our first-past-the-post system.
While most citizens are justifiably nervous as a result of the high cost of living environment in which we operate, some in the community are asking the government to establish a more long-term approach given the existing realities.
Among those realities is the growing elderly population with an estimated 50 per cent of our citizens now over the age of 50 years.
The ageing population is negatively impacting the sustainability of our national social security scheme, as the number of people contributing is declining while the number of people requiring its support through the provision of pensions is rising.
The imbalance will require careful management. However, there is also a concomitant challenge that is arising with an increasing elderly population, and that is dementia.
It is not simply a case of people getting older and forgetting where they placed items in the house or an inability to remember names. It is much deeper and more consequential.
Coordinator of the Government’s Community Elderly Care Programme, Mr George Griffith, outlined the magnitude of the problem as he addressed the House of Assembly during debate on the 2024-2025 Estimates of Expenditure and Revenue.
Dementia, which also includes the crippling condition known as Alzheimer’s, is afflicting more and more Barbadians, impairing their ability to function independently, and turning some of them into living zombies.
Mr Griffith, in his address to the Lower House, outlined that the Community Elderly Care Programme catered to almost 1 000 old folks and one-third of them were affected by dementia. This condition, he explained, required companions to spend more time working with these elderly people and it was creating a strain on the programme.
To respond to the challenge, the government programme is stepping up training of its workers who would typically spend about four hours with old people who either lived alone or were at home alone during the day while relatives were at work.
The growing challenge with this disease was also brought into the spotlight during the funeral service of former Commissioner of Police and Executive Director of the Regional Security Service Mr Grantley Watson.
His daughter, attorney-at-law and public advocate Tricia Watson, made a heartfelt plea while eulogising her father, for greater national attention and financial resources to be targeted at confronting this challenge.
With brain and nerve cells damaged, those affected by dementia often suffer changes in their behaviour and mood, they lose emotional control as their cognitive functions become impaired.
There are cases where dementia and Alzheimer’s patients refuse to eat, or bathe, may even become angry and abusive to those around them, and even forget what to do when bodily functions need attending to.
“The condition is devastating, both for the person suffering from dementia and for their loved ones. The condition carries a stigma in our society and is whispered about, as though the person committed some wrong; it should not!” Ms Watson told those attending her father’s funeral at the St Thomas Parish Church last week.
She added: “During my family’s journey coping with dementia, almost every person that we revealed my father’s condition to disclosed that they too had a close family member who was or had been afflicted with a form of dementia.”
More important, however, was Ms Watson’s admonishment to our government to treat the “prevalence of dementia here as a serious national matter”. She called for greater resources and urgent policy action to address the issue that is affecting so many Barbadian families.
As Ms Watson indicated, while her family had access to the resources needed to care for her father as he battled dementia, she sympathised with those who did not and were forced to cope on their own.
We concur with Ms Watson’s call and urge the government to treat the condition with the same focus as it has done with the National Insurance Scheme, for the two matters are deeply intertwined.
