Reporters in Canada have done some pretty spectacular reporting on aging issues.
The largest effort, Boomerangst, came from The Province in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Province has a weekday circulation of about 157,000 and Sunday circulation of 171,000. The weekly readership in print and online is 957,500.
The first piece in the newspaper’s 14-part series ran in mid-October; follow-up stories are ongoing.
Ros Guggi, deputy editor at the paper, describes how this exceptional effort came together and the community’s strong response.
By Ros Guggi
Boomerangst was a provocative series on aging that ran in The Province newspaper in Vancouver, British Columbia and on two websites. The series started out as 14 parts, but grew as readers told us shocking stories about the care – or lack of care – their relatives had received.
The idea originally came from people at our local United Way. Seniors are a big part of their mandate. They saw a looming problem and thought it might be worth us exploring.
I jumped at the chance. I have personal experience in dealing with aging parents who live thousands of miles away. I know what it is like to get the crisis phone call and have to race for the next plane. I have a dad with dementia, and an aging mom who is trying to live on her own.
I have led a series of advocacy projects at The Province that have won national and regional awards. As project leader for Boomerangst, I researched the issue, reading reports and talking to people with expertise in the community. I came to the same conclusion as the United Way had: that our region and province wasn’t anywhere near ready for the coming explosion in seniors. The first baby boomers are turning 65 this year and the number of seniors in our area is expected to double in the next 20 years. About 44 per cent of our population is now made up of baby boomers or parents of boomers.
This is a huge subject area. You could easily do 40 parts and not cover everything to do with aging. We finally narrowed it down to 14 parts. You can find them all at theprovince.com/boomerangst. We made a couple of early decisions. Each of the 14 parts had to be anchored with very human stories. They had to delve into the issues. They had to contain a lot of voices. In addition to exposing problems, we looked for success stories and encouraged people to come up with suggested solutions. The pages needed to be visually compelling.
We put together a team: a project editor, a graphic artist, four reporters, one columnist, two photographers and three web editors. Reporters got roughly a week to work on each segment. Most ran over four pages in the newspaper (tab sized), but some grew to five or more pages. Over the entire series, we ran 75 pages in print. There was additional material on our websites, including videos, stories and essays to complement what ran in paper.
To supplement what our reporters were writing, I approached 22 people in the community and asked them to write essays on various aspects of aging. One was a Canadian Senator who had written a major report on the issue. She wrote about the need for better support for unpaid caregivers. Others wrote about elder abuse, or gave practical advice about how to talk to your parents about going into a home.
We also posed four questions about aging to our reader panel, made up of more than 700 people who have signed up with us and given us their photos. These responses were sprinkled throughout the series and allowed us to bring many voices to the issues.
All the Boomerangst stories appeared at theprovince.com. We set up a separate standalone website called bcseniorhelp.com. We wanted it to become a go-to place for seniors and their families looking for resources, homes, and expert advice. We recruited ten experts who are willing to answer reader questions on everything from Alzheimer’s to how to get home health care. We turned to our research library and a web editor in the newsroom to create this website and the resources database.
Readers were invited to comment on the stories, and to discuss the issues on both websites. We also asked them for their feedback to our series, and ran some of it in the paper.
The series ran daily in paper for 14 days. Several stories kicked off on page 1. On our last day, we ran ten recommendations for change and got responses to those recommendations from our provincial health minister and from the opposition party. We also created a form online with the recommendations and invited readers to agree with ours, or create their own. Each recommendation was automatically sent to the Premier of our province and the health minister. To date, close to 160 readers have weighed in this way.
During the series we got a heartbreaking letter from a senior. She was lonely and talked about preferring suicide to ever going into a home. I contacted her directly with information on where to get help. I also got her permission to run the letter, without her name.
I knew that she was probably the tip of the iceberg; that a lot of lonely seniors out there needed assistance, perhaps a friendly visit, or help with household chores or groceries. I approached the United Way to see if they would match volunteers to needy seniors in the community. They agreed. We ran a plea for people to come forward to help and quickly got more than 125 offers. The United Way is matching these folks with agencies that will vet them before matching them with seniors in need.
The series generated a lot of reaction. We heard from one reader who is convinced her 88-year-old aunt with dementia wouldn’t have frozen to death outside had health authorities intervened and concluded she could no longer live alone at home. It explored many complicated, grey issues. When does the need for safety, for instance, outweigh someone’s decision that they want to continue living at risk?
One of the most moving stories was the case of the man who weighed 59 pounds. He was 71 years old and died in a motel room with a fridge full of food. The coroner who found him is haunted still by the sight. “How could he get to be that way without society trying to do more than what they did?” he asked. The coroner took a real chance talking to us about a death that had been swept under the carpet.
“Some of SLV’s staff members were less than forthcoming with the facts surrounding Mr. Mooney’s final minutes, leaving management unaware of the correct circumstances,” a coroner wrote later.
We published that story the last day of our series. The government minister responsible for senior care homes stood up in the legislature and apologized. He also said he was looking into getting an independent advocate for seniors, which was one of our key recommendations.
Part of our series was based on Freedom of Information requests we had made for information about abuses and unexpected deaths in senior care homes throughout B.C. We had a great deal of difficulty getting this information. There were no details beyond raw numbers and statistics. This illustrated how difficult it is for families to make informed decisions when choosing care homes. We found it was easier to buy a car in British Columbia than to choose a care home.
Reaction? One reader said, “The Boomerangst series was alarming, insightful, educational, relevant and thought-provoking.” Another called it “brilliant.”
We engaged readers in the conversation. We forced the government to look at changing the way it governs senior care homes in our province. The health ministry now agrees that having two separate acts for public and private homes makes no sense.
We are continuing to follow the series and will keep pressing the government for necessary reforms.
