Cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and mobility challenges due to joint pain are among the common conditions Cayman’s ageing population is battling today.
Geriatrician Dr. Glaister Bell, who heads up the Health Services Authority’s new geriatric specialist clinic, says he’s seen these conditions in more regular numbers amongst Cayman’s seniors over the 13 years he has been here.
“The chronic diseases are just with us on a daily basis,” he said, singling out the “very common” hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol.
“As you get older, they tend to manifest themselves more,” he added, explaining that people may be dealing with complications that they did not realise were connected to a specific disease.
“By far, a lot of our older adults will unfortunately have these chronic diseases.”
However, Bell, speaking with the Cayman Compass in a recent interview, said he hopes with the introduction of the geriatric clinic, senior citizens will be able to better manage their conditions for a greater quality of life.
“What we are hoping for is that people will access it and will use it to their own advantage in terms of their health, making wise decisions. We want you to grow older and healthier. That is the key,” he said.
Gap for senior healthcare identified
Last month the HSA, with Bell – the first qualified geriatrician at the authority – launched the first geriatric clinic at its Smith Road Medical Centre.
Medical Director Dr. Delroy Jefferson, through a statement, said that offering the geriatric services was a result of the HSA addressing the medical and welfare needs of members of the community.
“The Cayman Islands has a growing elderly population and as such, we must cater to these individuals requiring more attention by virtue of their age and conditions to which they are susceptible in order to ensure a better quality of life and care,” Jefferson said.
Bell, who has been working as a family doctor for decades, welcomed the special emphasis on caring for Cayman seniors by way of their own specialist clinic, especially as those 60 and over make up approximately 12% of the population, according to the 2021 Population and Housing Census Report.
“It’s only fair that our system should reward [seniors] in terms of providing the healthcare that [they] need,” he said, adding prior to the clinic there were paediatric services, but the older adult was “just left behind”.
“[It was] sad to see, but thank God the government, the board of the HSA saw that there was this need, there was this deficit, and did something about it,” he said.
As a family doctor, he said he saw the need for specialised attention for the older population and being able to have the clinic open to them, without the need for a referral, will help encourage seniors to take control of their own health care.
Geriatricians, he said, love to care for the “functional capacity and functionality” in general of the older adult.
“We not only focus on the regular – call it garden medicine – but we also care for, screen for and manage individuals with cognitive impairment [such as] common dementia and the subsets of those… Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia [and] Lewy body dementia,” he said.
At the clinic, seniors are assessed for such things as their general health, hearing, mental health and medication interactions.
“We also look out for the older adult with pain, especially chronic pain. A lot of our older adults are just in so much pain, and pain becomes, for a lot of them, something that they have to deal with on a daily basis. We screen to find out if our older adult is having some element of pain and try and do something about that,” he said.
For Bell, caring for the older adults is not only a passion, it is a mission, he said.
Having grown up with his maternal grandmother, and being surrounded with older folks at church services, Bell said he would just gravitate to seniors, which is why he wants to look out for Cayman’s elderly.
“I guess as you get older you have more wisdom and so on. I wanted to learn from them. When I did medical school and then did family medicine, I realised that I had a knack for the studies that concerned the older folks,” he said.
“We’ll be here to assist you to make the right choices in terms of your health going forward and try and improve the quality of life that you now have and hopefully will continue having until that time comes when we say goodbye to the earth,” he said.
The clinic operates Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays by appointment.
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