Addressing Needs
Co-operative Home Care - Community Based Care: Worker Driven Care
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Simon Berge
Home care is an underutilized method for delivering care to seniors across Canada. The initial development of Canada’s senior care system was through the expansion of poor houses. This poor house approach established the warehouse method of care for seniors bringing seniors to the facilities to save on healthcare costs incurred by provincial governments. This project examines the development of community-based home care worker co-operatives. These co-operatives focus on the provisioning of home care within communities by local personal support workers (PSW) that understand the care needs within the community but lack the business acumen to establish a viable business without supports through collaborative co-production with business experts. Through a descriptive case study and survey approach this project outlines the development drivers and challenges that are faced by personal support workers in establishing a co-operative that provides home care services. Questions of agency, awareness of goals, and awareness of business approaches to meet those goals will be examined as moderators for PSWs deciding to become co-operators within the care sector. Statistical analysis of survey responses shows that goals focused on community care and agency pull workers toward entrepreneurship, but awareness of co-operative business models push them to co-op entrepreneurship.
Older People in Old Buildings: Prisons and Ageing in New Zealand
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christine McCarthy
Internationally the prison population is getting older. Ageing affects prisons in two other senses. A number of prison buildings are old - some physically, but for others the ideology underpinning their design prioritises young bodies. It has also been demonstrated that prison life prematurely ages people. Prison architecture is consequently often mismatched to the bodies of older prisoners, including mobility, thermoregulation, cognition, and sensorial perception. Unlike many other professions, the discipline and profession of architecture has barely - if at all - responded. Few examples of prisons designed for older people exist. Largely, the built environment response has been retrofitting single wards to accommodate portions of the ageing incarcerated population, including as dementia wards, hospices and palliative care units on prison grounds. This paper examines these examples and the issues that emerge from an analysis of New Zealand government policies on ageing, building regulations, Ombudsman and prison inspectorate reports, and prison building, furniture, and landscape design. It identifies opportunities that the design of prison environments might proactively address, but it also asks the question of whether or not older people ought to be incarcerated because of the limits of what architecture can do.
