Community Services will pay for the cab for a person who is getting released from day surgery if the person cannot take the bus home. But finding someone to accompany you home who the hospital approves of is sometimes difficult, Kendall Worth reports.
We need to start thinking of being child free as merely another way to live your life, every bit as ordinary as choosing to have children. Christina Elgee chose such a childfree life and here she writes about living outside accepted cultural norms, and the the hurdles she encountered when she decided to seek sterilization in Nova Scotia.
Governments are increasingly using Social Impact Bonds as a method to finance what are broadly called social services. With social impact bonds governments repay investors only if the programs improve social outcomes, for example, lower unemployment or prison recidivism. The approach has been tried in Justice and corrections, skills training, public health, child welfare, services for seniors, early childhood development, education, homelessness, supports for people with physical disabilities, and mental health to name a few. But really it’s just another flavour of privatization, writes Danny Cavanagh.
We talk with Dr. Ellen Hickey about how in Nova Scotia we give up way too easily on people with dementia. “When it comes to long term care, all you hear is doctors, drugs, nurses. What about the rest of the team? There is all kinds of know-how that will help keep people off these drugs, that will keep them out of the doctor’s office. Isn’t that what it is all about?”
In Nova Scotia one of the major barriers for people with disabilities is simple paperwork, writes Warren (Gus) Reed of the James McGregor Stewart Society.
Danny Cavanagh on the government plans to build the QEII replacement through a P3 approach. “The real lesson history teaches is that private-public partnership deals are bad for taxpayers.”
NSGEU news release on this morning’s announcement that QEII redevelopment, which include the eventual decommissioning of part of the Victoria General site and the construction of five new health care buildings in the Halifax area, will be using a P3 model. “This government has chosen the most expensive way to get this project done,” said NSGEU President Jason MacLean.
We need new ways of supporting autistic and other neurodivergent children in Nova Scotia, writes autism activist and frequent NS Advocate contributor Alex Kronstein. Approaches that are rooted in ideas of accommodation, articulated by actually autistic people.
Weekend video: Meet Dave, a resident of Nova Scotia’s South Shore, as he talks about the PTSD that he lives with, and his inability to find proper help. “And yet I sit here, through no fault of my own, in a position I can’t control. And when I ask for help, there is nobody listening.”
Toni MacAfee with some personal observations on on the tremendous job done by Long Term Care workers anywhere in the province. They do this under very difficult circumstances. We need more and better paid staff, the residents and the workers deserve it, says Toni.