The Marjorie Willoughby Snowden Memorial Hospice Home

Category: Supportive Housing | Author(s): Josh Dawson

Image Credit: Marjorie Willoughby Hospice Bed – Josh Dawson

Location Address: 72 Whiteshield Crescent S, Kamloops, BC V2E 2S9

Subject

The Marjorie Willoughby Snowden Memorial Hospice Home is a 12-bed home located in Sahali and is run by the Kamloops Hospice Association. The home provides hospice care to Kamloops residents for a variety of reasons. “They can come for true end-of-life care, so they’re coming here to pass. We take patients for symptom management as well, so if a patient has uncontrollable pain or nausea, we’ll help support them and help get those symptoms managed. And then we do take patients for respite as well, so that is for caregiver burnout. So, if their caregiver is having a hard time caring for them at home, they can come here and get a little break” explains Shelby Willson, a registered nurse and Clinical Lead at the home. “We really focus on patient-centered care and family-centered care. We have nurses, care aids, doctors, counselors, community nurses, and we all work closely together to care for patients at end of life.”

Hospice care is an approach that focuses on providing the best end-of-life care for each individual. The Marjorie Willoughby Snowden Memorial Hospice Home provides a range of different forms of care to help support its patient’s needs. “We do all care,” says Willson. “So that starts with providing meals for our patients, we do personal care like bathing, hygiene, that sort of thing. And then we’ll do medication administration, symptom management, all that sort of thing. As well as looking at psychosocial piece with patients and their families. So, we do offer counseling and spiritual support.” The average patient at Marjorie Willoughby is approximately 61 years old and stays for an average of 11 days. The home houses 12 of the 16 hospice beds in Kamloops, with the remaining 4 housed at the Overlander Residential Care facility in Brocklehurst.

Crisis

Within Kamloops, there are 16 hospice beds to support a population of 97,905 in 2021, according to Statistics Canada. In 2021 there were approximately 944 deaths according to BC Vital Statistics while Marjorie Willoughby Snowden Memorial Hospice Home receives approximately 250 patients on average throughout the year. This is troubling as approximately 357 people between January 2022 and November 24th, 2022 have applied to be received by a hospice home in Kamloops, which is evidently much higher than the number of people that are admitted to Marjorie Willoughby. These numbers help to illustrate the discrepancy in the number of hospice beds available in Kamloops compared to the number of people who may require end-of-life care. In order for patients to be admitted into a hospice home in Kamloops, they must first apply through Central Intake at Interior Health. According to Lauren Charlwood, the Community Hospice Access Coordinator at Central Intake, Central Intake has at any given time approximately 2 to 8 patients seeking to get into Marjorie Willoughby. Charlwood states that Kamloops would require “at least 10 more beds” to accommodate the number of patients seeking admission into hospice.

For patients seeking to gain entry into a hospice home, there is unfortunately a lack of available alternatives for those who are placed on a waitlist. While most Long-Term Care (LTC) facilities do provide palliative care, patients are rarely able to transition from an LTC facility to a Hospice Home because, as Erin Gardner, the Executive Director of Marjorie Willoughby, explains, “Interior Health’s policy is if they have a bed in a facility, so Long-Term Care or somewhere like that, then they can palliate there and they wouldn’t move to a hospice bed.” Additionally, getting into an LTC facility can prove difficult as an alternative to hospice as the wait times in Kamloops range from three to 18 months, depending on the facility, according to Interior Health. This is troubling as hospice care is provided when a patient has “about three months or less” says Gardner, meaning that some patients may not survive the wait time. According to Charlwood, patients sometimes die in a Hospital while on the waitlist to be received by a hospice home.

Another alternative to a hospice home is to receive care at home, which the Hospice Association provides. Gardner explains that “We do have community programs that can go out and see people and try to advocate to help them get the support that they need in their home. But there is definitely a staffing crisis to have community health care aids and nurses go out and see people in their homes.” In addition to a crisis in staffing, home care can be difficult for the family members and loved ones who care for the patient. “Even though people quite often think that they want to be at home for end-of-life, that causes a whole other aspect to their family members becoming caregivers. They don’t necessarily have skilled clinical people who are able to come into their home to help manage their pain.” Additionally, at-home care assumes that these patients have homes to stay at. Given that many, but not all, hospice patients are elderly, this can be troubling as there is a lack of affordable housing for seniors in Kamloops, as illustrated in the City of Kamloops Affordable Housing Strategy and the Housing Needs Assessment. Meaning that many elderly patients may struggle to find a location to stay for at-home care.

Greater capacity in the number of hospice beds in Kamloops is needed to house the number of patients who are seeking hospice care and are unable to receive support through any alternatives.

Video Credit: Josh Dawson. Interviewee: Erin Gardner

Community Implications

Many people falsely assume that hospice care is only given to elderly patients. However, as mentioned previously, the average age for patients at Marjorie Willoughby is 61 years old with the most common illness being lung cancer. Gardner explains that “We’ve had someone here who was 19, and so that really brings down the average when you’re looking at the average age. But cancer is the biggest reason that we have people admitted and that doesn’t matter how old you are. So, 61 does seem young, and it is, but it is quite often the age category that we have people admitted to us.”

Evidently, age will not always be a reliable predictor of when we will be approaching the end of our lives or when we will require hospice care. Given the unpredictability of illnesses like cancer, accessing hospice care is a crisis that everyone should be concerned about. Not only will a crisis in hospice bed capacity affect the community of Kamloops, but it may affect our own family members, loved ones, and eventually ourselves.

As Willson explains it, “I think people in Kamloops should care about this because everyone is going to die at some point. Everyone is going to have someone in their life that needs palliative care. It’s just a part of life. So, I think it’s really important that people understand hospice palliative care and understand the need for it.”

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A Way Forward

We recognize that no one suggestion will solve the housing crisis in Kamloops, but based on our research, here are some ideas that may help move us even slightly forward.

Given the demand for more hospice beds in Kamloops, the difficulty in making this a reality lies in funding. “We do have 12 beds here and half of our funding comes from Interior Health. The rest of our funding we need to fundraise,” says Gardner. “We really need our community to support us so we can continue to stay open with 12 beds because we are not fully funded.” The Hospice Association fundraises over 1$ Million a year to fund the home. Additional funding would be required to increase the number of hospice beds in Kamloops.

This funding could be acquired by electing local MLAs who will prioritize funding for palliative and hospice programs within our health region. By increasing the available budget for hospice care, hopefully this new budget could be spent towards a new hospice home or towards an expansion to a pre-existing home. Gardner states that “In a perfect world, maybe we would be able to open more beds. It wouldn’t be in this facility, we’re kind of tapped out for space here.”

Additional funding could be used towards an outreach program in Kamloops to support hospice patients who are capable of receiving at-home care or those who are unable to enter a hospice home. Gardner explains her hopes for the future: “At some point, I’d like to be able to run an outreach program out of hospice for people who don’t want to come to hospice or are unable to. So, at some point hopefully we’ll be able to come up with the funds for that.”

Finally, given the significant amount of funding that is received through donations and fundraising, assisting the Kamloops Hospice Association in raising funds through the community would also aid in the creation of an outreach program or an increase in hospice beds in Kamloops.

The difficulty in accessing hospice care poses a crisis that is difficult to solve without the attention of those who are, or will be, affected. We require Kamloops residents to recognize the crisis, understand the need for additional funds, and care about how the crisis will affect all of us one day. In Gardner’s words, “I think everyone should care. We don’t have a huge amount of time necessarily out there. So, I think everyone should live their life like they don’t have a whole lot of time left.”