Graham Brown, right, president of the Lloydminster Concerned Citizens for Seniors Care Society, holds up a copy of a flyer promoting the group’s first AGM in 2014. Founders Rod Sellers, left, and Dr. Raf Sayeed spoke about the history of the group during its 10-year anniversary celebration meeting on Oct. 24. Geoff Lee Meridian Source
The Lloydminster Concerned Citizens for Seniors Care Society briefly dropped its advocacy gloves to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
The seniors’ group, headed by president Graham Brown, celebrated the milestone with cake a week ago, putting lobbying efforts for more long-term spaces on pause.
“It’s great to be celebrating 10 years as a society, but it was Rod Sellers and Dr. Raf Sayeed that started meeting back in 2005,” said Brown.
“There was another eight years of meeting every week and working on trying to get more long-term spaces until we decided we needed to form a society.”
Brown says getting more spaces is still the number one issue after all these years.
“The Jubilee Home is up for getting replaced (long-term horizon),” he said.
“We want to make sure we replace that and a lot of new additional beds. We need another 50-60 additional beds on top of that.”
Sellers and Sayeed were on hand to talk about what got them involved, with Sellers being the trailblazer in 2004 according to his recollection.
“When my parents were going into the extended care system, I realized how inadequate it was and where there were a lot of deficiencies,” said Sellers.
He later told the meeting, “all of a sudden they were talking about shipping my parents out of town. I started to speak up about it.”
That caught the attention of a younger Dr. Sayeed who saw similar concerns in the community and the two of them hooked up to get the ball rolling for more spaces.
“We decided to get together and try to get some people together and start trying to do something about the problems,” said Sellers.
Brown presented the two men with a list of the organization’s accomplishments saying, “here’s what you started.”
Ironically, the need for more spaces was highlighted by a copy of an Oct. 17 report on wait lists from Sharon Jackson, manager Primary Health Home Care.
The Lloydminster Continuing Care Centre had two people on the list, Dr. Cooke Extended Care Centre, four, Jubilee Home, two, Points West, 20 and Pioneer House, 15.
The Lloydminster Hospital had five people assessed and waiting for placement, Maidstone two waiting for placement and Turtleford one person.
Looking back, Brown thinks the senior group’s overall accomplishment is now being well known in the community by the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments as a mover and shaker.
“Our lobbying has paid off in the ambulance service and with the building of the (Lloydminster) Continuing Care Centre,” said Brown with the Jubilee Home rebuild on the horizon.
“We do get listened to now, whereas it wasn’t like that before.”
Sayeed noted the seniors’ care society has been instrumental in the development of the original Lloydminster Integrated Health Services and Facility Infrastructure Needs Assessment in 2013.
“Now, we are redoing that same needs assessment and we are putting pressure on them (provincial governments) to move along with the assessment,” said Sayeed.
Sellers thinks lobbying progress on seniors’ issues over the years has been limited by continuous changes in government and continuous changes in the bi-provincial health ministries, including his past time in the group.
“It would seem like every time we ‘d get two steps ahead with the health minister who finally got oriented to the portfolio, he would be shuffled along and there would be a new minister and we’d have to start all over again,” he lamented.
“I know we still have problems in Lloydminster with extended care beds.”
Sellers believes the Seniors Care Society does serve a very important function for change.
“It’s important that we keep politicians’ feet to the fire because there’s certainly lots of problems in our healthcare system,” he said.
