Elderly care too costly, says government MP

A government minister on Tuesday called for urgent action to ease the “exceedingly high” costs of essential supplies for the elderly and disabled, warning that many Barbadian families are struggling to provide dignified care amid soaring prices for items such as adult diapers and specialised nutrition products.

“I do not know how families manage, who have an elderly or ill relative or a disabled person they are caring for—how they manage with the cost of care, the cost of supplies to take care of these persons,” Sandra Husbands, MP for St James South, said on the floor of the House of Assembly, expressing bewilderment at how families managed under the weight of care expenses.

“The cost of adult briefs is exceedingly high—$50 for a pack that will not last a week,” she added.

She made the remarks during a debate on a resolution to vest lands at Coverley in Christ Church to the Barbados Association of Cancer Advocacy (BACA), which intends to build a 14-bed palliative care facility for patients with terminal illnesses.

Husbands, the minister for training and tertiary education, decried the unaffordability of other critical items such as specialised nutritional drinks, particularly for diabetics.

She said: “The individual cost of these items is too high for many families to be able to afford to give that person the balanced nutrition which they need. Now, I am not an advocate of price control, that’s the truth. I know what price control did to this country when we put price controls on the basic food items in Barbados. It led to the death of small shops all across this nation.”

She called for a thorough analysis of possible pricing interventions for essential elder care supplies: “Whether we can undertake to make control on the pricing of these essential care items for the elderly, for people who are disabled and who need [but] who cannot get them, to make sure that they stay affordable for our people, that we can give the kind of care to our seniors and give them a dignified life, because when it is not available, these things are stretched and they’re stretched in ways that do not redound to the health of our seniors.”

Husbands praised the collaborative model behind the proposed palliative care project, describing it as an example of what can be achieved through strong partnerships.

“It represents the NGO community, it represents the diaspora, it represents government coming together to address a critical problem in our country and to me this model is an important model that we need to embrace,” Husbands said. “This is a model that I believe can revolutionise what is happening for the terminally ill in our country. I therefore want to recommend as well that we need to take another step and to make a call into our community for others to step forward to be able to look at respite care.” (IMC1)