“As people age, they need access to compassionate and dignified care,” said Adrian Dix, Minister of Health. “That’s why our government is expanding long-term care throughout the province, including in Prince George. Through our partnership with Providence Living, a new care home is coming to Prince George, which adds more long-term care beds to the community to ensure more seniors can stay in the community they love with the support they need.”

Providence and Northern Health have signed an agreement to build a long-term care home that will add 200 beds in Prince George at 6500 Southridge Ave. Providence, in partnership with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Prince George, is contributing the land. This is the first new long-term care facility to be built in Prince George in 15 years.

Providence Living is committed to improving both the environment and experience of older British Columbians living in long-term care. Driven by research and global best practices, Providence Living is a leader in creating innovative services, homes, neighbourhoods and communities in which people can imagine themselves and their loved ones living full and realized lives.

Created by Providence Health Care, but now a stand-alone, non-profit organization with its own board and management structure, Providence Living will remain closely aligned with Providence Health Care as it grows and expands.

We are bound by the common belief that compassion connected to faith-based principles results in resident care that feels like it comes from family, and is provided in a place that feels like home.

We are a Catholic health care community…

Inspired by the healing ministry of Jesus Christ, we are a Catholic health care community dedicated to meeting the physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs of those served through compassionate care, teaching and research.

Our values are rooted in the values, history and tradition of our Founding Sisters that arrived in British Columbia more than 125 years ago and established numerous Catholic hospitals and care homes.

At Providence Living, we create space for the individuality, joy and spontaneity that make life rich and fulfilling. We innovate, challenge conventions, and most of all listen long and hard to the real experts: the people living in our care communities and their families.

Providence falls within the Vancouver Coastal Health region but is governed by its own, independent Board of Directors. We are accountable to our patients and residents, Vancouver Coastal Health, the BC Ministry of Health, our Board and BC taxpayers.

Much like how Catholic schools are funded by tax dollars, Catholic hospitals are part of this country’s universal health care system. Before the institution of public health care, in the 1950s and ’60s, the land and buildings for Catholic facilities might have been paid for by religious orders. Today, however, the hospitals are funded the same way as non-Catholic ones. Provincial and territorial governments cover their operating budgets, including staff, equipment, and energy bills. And the hospitals raise money for extras, like fancy new wings and upgraded machines. (Catholic hospitals and secular ones are governed by the same provincial legislation, which outlines their reporting requirements, employment standards, and more. These laws permit faith-based hospitals to refuse some services for religious reasons.) But, unlike those who attend Catholic schools, which their parents might choose for faith-based education, patients often end up in a Catholic health care facility simply because it’s the closest one. Many Canadians don’t even realize which hospitals are Catholic and which are not, and many patients are never affected by their hospital’s religious affiliation. For a patient who visits St. Michael’s, in Toronto, or St. Paul’s Hospital, in Vancouver, for an MRI or an appendectomy, the experience would be the same as at any other publicly funded hospital. It’s when patients request an abortion or are hoping to have their tubes tied that they might be told, “Sorry, we don’t do that here.”

“It’s incredibly anachronistic that, at a number of our facilities, the ultimate authority is appointed by the Catholic Church, literally by the Vatican,” says Ryan Hoskins, an emergency physician in BC who has written about Catholic health care in Alberta. “I think that’s absurd.”

Lisa Saffarek, who works as a health system administrator in BC, says her dad’s last two weeks were consumed by the logistics of trying to get a transfer out of a Catholic hospital for the assisted death that he wanted. In the end, he did get transferred to another hospital, but he died the morning after the transfer. It wasn’t the death he wanted, surrounded by his whole family. Saffarek describes her dad as a grab-life-by-the-horns guy who came to Canada from Germany as a teenage prisoner of war and went on to open a ski hill in Smithers. (Before he had the funds to buy a chairlift, he would teach people to ski by “walking up and down the slopes all day,” she says.) Saffarek says her dad wanted to talk to the nurses about MAID and how his decision was affecting his family, but “you could see them avoiding eye contact.” This lack of emotional support “was the hardest part,” she says.

Jonathan Reggler, the family doctor from BC, says he’s witnessed several patients suffer due to Catholic health institutions’ refusals to provide MAID. One patient had to be transferred by ambulance to the trailer he lived in, accessible only by an extremely rough gravel road. “We couldn’t give him the sorts of drugs that you would ordinarily give somebody for a painful transfer because he had to have capacity at the time of his MAID,” recalls Reggler. His trailer was too small, so Reggler administered MAID “in a cold, leaky vehicle shed.” One family doctor in Thunder Bay describes witnessing a patient being transferred from her room in a Catholic-run long-term care home, filled with quilts she’d sewn and photos of loved ones, to a sterile hospital room for MAID. In winter, she says, residents are transferred by ambulance when it’s minus-forty degrees out, simply to die. The patients are “disgusted,” the doctor says, “but this population is too weak and too frail and exhausted” to put up a fight.

Providence Living is developing a 156-bed long-term care facility on a 14-acre site in the Town of Comox. Beds in the new care village, to be known as Providence Living at The Views, will replace those currently located at The Views at St. Joseph’s.

Using the concepts of a dementia village, our vision includes smaller households that support freedom to choose, move and connect. Our innovative village design will also improve residents’ access to nature and interaction with the community, including fostering of intergenerational connections.

Educational deserts are a concept I became aware somewhere during my 4 years as a Student Recruitment Officer for UNBC and has floated in and out of my head since then. Most recently, it came up in a conversation between my fiancé (a southern Ontario kid) and me (a Terrace kid) when we were chatting about how we felt when we graduated high school and were making decisions about the rest of our lives.

Brittany, like many of her high school friends, lived at home during her time attending University - one of 3 (or 4) Universities within commuting distance of her childhood home (alongside countless colleges). This is a fact that she, much like I, didn’t spend a lot of time examining when making the decision but rather just rolled with the big influences of her (and most 17 year olds’) life - her parents and her friends. For most of the University-bound kids, living at home to save some money (while still having access to an abundance of options) was just baked in to the equation.