By Cheryl Jahn

Rural seniors face more challenges than their urban counterparts

Feb 16, 2024 | 1:35 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The Office of the Seniors Advocate, Isobel Mackenzie, was in Prince George for a town hall-style meeting the day after she released a report summarizing the disproportionate challenges to healthy aging experienced by seniors living in B.C.’s rural communities.

“Seniors everywhere experience difficulties related to aging but as I’ve traveled the province and examined the data, it’s clear that people who live far from urban centers face even greater obstacles because they have fewer services and resources to support them,” says Mackenzie.

The report ‘Resilient and Resourceful: Challenges Facing BC’s Rural Seniors’ looks at the differences between rural and urban seniors’ populations and examines a range of services and supports to compare service levels between what is available in both rural and urban B.C. Overall, the report concludes that rural B.C. has a proportionately higher and faster-growing seniors population with fewer resources and services when compared to the urban seniors population.

“We face a geographical challenge where 86 percent of our population is concentrated in dense urban cores on 4 percent of our land mass. The vastness of rural B.C. makes accessing supports by aging seniors more difficult because critical services are spread over a large, sparsely-populated area.”

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The report notes:

• Seniors are 25 percent of B.C.’s rural population compared to urban B.C. where seniors are 19 percent of the population;

• Seniors in communities in the Northern, Interior, and Vancouver Island health authorities have a lower life expectancy compared to those in Vancouver Coastal and Fraser health authorities where more of the population is concentrated in urban centres;

• 51 percent of seniors in rural B.C. communities are married, compared to 63 percent in urban areas with single seniors more likely to need home support, assisted living and long-term care;

• The rate of acute care beds per 1,000 population is 70 percent lower in rural BC and the average length of stay as an alternative level of care patient is 27 percent higher.