Rotarians and other volunteers are being praised by a senior leader with Alberta Health Services for stepping up during the pandemic to help address seniors’ loneliness.

 

Even before the pandemic, loneliness was identified as the most significant factor causing seniors and other vulnerable individuals to access the health-care system, said Dr. Richard Lewanczuk, the senior medical director for Health System Integration at AHS.

 

Loneliness results from a “lack of social connections,”  explained Lewanczuk, who describes his primary role as enhancing care in the community.

 

Rotary clubs (including Rotaract, Interact and Earlyact) across Districts 5370 and 5360 (which includes clubs in south and central Alberta and southwest Saskatchewan) responded to the pandemic in myriad ways that created the important social connections that isolated seniors need.

 

Realizing that residents of a senior centre were locked down to keep COVID-19 out of their home and were therefore unable to have in-person visitors, Rotarians in one club donated funds to help purchase tablet computers (such as iPads) to enable seniors to communicate with family and friends.

 

Another club provided funding and volunteers to support a winter response meeting for unhoused and disadvantaged persons, offering hot meals, warm beverages and cold weather supplies. The club also provided Christmas gifts to mothers in an emergency shelter.

 

Other Rotarians prepared hundreds of individual meals in their homes and delivered them to people living in a centre for people with developmental challenges. Rotarians also volunteered to make Meals on Wheels deliveries.

 

Across both Districts, Rotarians and Rotaracters held food drives, donated money and volunteered at local food banks.

 

Some clubs provided lunches for school children and delivered sandwiches to seniors who were unable to visit the drop-in centre where they usually ate lunch. Members of one Rotary club distributed sandwiches, along with warm clothing and blankets, to people living on the street.

 

In another community, Rotarians delivered groceries to seniors in need and ensured that seniors received Valentine love in February. Rotaractors elsewhere teamed up with an Earlyact club  in an elementary school to create 800 handmade cards for isolated seniors at Christmas and partnered with a Rotary club to deliver individual homemade pies with the cards. Other Rotarians wrote Christmas cards to people living in a shelter for unhoused people.

 

Members of one Rotary club teamed up with two Interact clubs to send messages of appreciation to health-care workers and educators.

 

Throughout the pandemic, Lewanczuk has met with representatives of non-profit and community agencies, including District 5370 PDG Jim Ferguson (Rotary E-Club of Canada One) and District 5360 PDG Mary Turner (Rotary Club of Olds).

 

“It’s the most valuable committee that I have or participate in,” he said, noting that it provides an opportunity for two-way communication between AHS and community groups.

 

“The biggest benefit to AHS was the ability to really find out what’s going on—on the street, so to speak—from the not-for-profits and volunteer and charitable organizations,” Lewanczuk said. “What are people thinking, feeling, experiencing? What challenges are they facing … what activities are various organizations doing?

 

“It really helps us to take that information to appropriate levels within Alberta Health Services or even to Alberta Health (the ministry that governs Alberta Health Services) to say, ‘OK, this is working, this isn’t working. There are problems here or needs there.’ ”

 

The meetings are also a chance for non-profits to learn “what’s going on in the health-care system, why it’s happening,” Lewanczuk said.

 

Through these meetings, Lewanczuk has been able to emphasize the importance of what volunteers such as Rotarians do. “What they’re doing might seem something that was just a nice thing to do, but really what they do has a much broader and deeper impact than they might anticipate.”

 

The consequences of loneliness on the health of seniors emerged from an AHS study that involved researchers of geriatric issues who sought to identify factors that would predict who would be hospitalized within the next year.

 

“If we knew who might be hospitalized in the coming year, we could intervene to prevent that hospitalization,” Lewanczuk said.

 

In the end, the research didn’t yield what they hoped it would.

 

“We found we just couldn’t predict with any reliability who is going to end up in a hospital and yet anybody, the average person, can guess pretty accurately who amongst their relatives or elderly friends is likely to end up in a hospital the next year,” he said.

 

“It turns out the reason we couldn’t figure it out is because it had nothing to do with their medical illness and everything to do with their social situation. Of all of the social factors, we found out that loneliness was actually the greatest predictor of hospitalization.”

 

This finding provided a direct link to the value of what Rotarians and Rotaractors do and how they “Serve to Change Lives.”

 

“Health care is just people looking after people. That’s all it is, ” said Lewanczuk. “We have some highly educated and skilled people like neurosurgeons, but at the end of the day, it’s a person looking after another person.

 

“Visiting someone, providing socialization or addressing loneliness is every bit as much a health-care activity as is neurosurgery.”

 

Lewanczuk emphasized that most health care occurs in the community, not in health-care facilities.

 

“In the health-care system, we think that we’re the big providers of care but it turns out that the health-care system only provides about three per cent of care.

 

“The majority of care in the community is provided by family caregivers. Typically, it is one older spouse looking after another older spouse or partner, but it can be an adult child looking after an older adult parent or it can be a parent, looking after a disabled child.”

 

The next greatest type of care within the community is self-care.

 

“If we can create a situation where people are able to manage for themselves and do that through simple mechanical aides, for example, then they’re able to maintain their independence. They’re not dependent on somebody,” said Lewanczuk.

 

“Together, family caregivers and self-care contribute 90 per cent of care. Of the remaining 10 per cent, seven per cent are services provided by the not-for-profit volunteer and charitable sector.”

 

Supports within the community help to reduce the number of seniors accessing the health-care system unnecessarily. Those who lack supports are at greater risk of being hospitalized.

 

 

“We often ask people who have been to the hospitals, if you get sick, is there somebody who can look after you? If there’s nobody that can look after you when you’re sick, we can’t send them home. We have to admit them to hospital,” Lewanczuk said.

 

This means that the health-care professionals find themselves addressing problems unrelated to medical illness.

 

“We’re trying to solve a social problem with the hospital,” said Lewanczuk. “This has an impact on our health-care costs and the health-care system.”