Kim Brundrit knows the stress of keeping people with dementia safe.
She sees it everyday at Dementia Network Calgary, where she works. She feels it everyday as she watches her mother live with the disease.
Her parents’ condo is fitted with door alarms. Her mother’s purse, cane and jacket have location trackers on them. So far, it works — most of the time. Once her mother left her condo unit early in the morning. But she could not exit the building and was found.
When someone with dementia gets lost, their family or caregivers may feel guilty. “People often feel, I’m the only one this has ever happened to and I must be doing a terrible job,” Brundrit said. “That’s not true at all.”
Brundrit is the co-chair of the Calgary Missing Older Adult Resource Network, a coalition of 14 organizations dedicated to preventing seniors from getting lost and helping find seniors that are. The Calgary Police Service and the Calgary Fire Department are members.
In Calgary, four seniors are reported missing every week, says Brundrit. This is especially concerning for people with dementia. They may not realize they are lost or be able to communicate what they need. They may not be dressed appropriately and could be braving winter weather wearing slippers.
Concern is growing. The Alzheimer Society of Canada estimates that by 2030, one million Canadians will have dementia, a significant increase from the 600,000 who currently do. This has prompted several organizations to call for the creation of Silver Alerts: alerts that would go to cellphones to report a missing senior or other vulnerable person.
But experts say alerts need to be designed properly to be effective. If not, they could do more harm than good.
Too many alerts may cause people to ignore them altogether, said Brundrit.
Timely information is key
Calls for Silver Alerts have ramped up across Canada. A year-long pilot project in three Quebec communities is set to conclude this month.
Last March, Alberta changed its Missing Persons Act to allow police to broadcast alerts in specific communities when a senior goes missing.
In Ontario, a bill that would allow the Ontario Provincial Police to issue alerts when a vulnerable person is missing was referred to the legislature’s standing committee on justice policy last March. The bill specifically says police can indicate where alerts would be most effective. For example, instead of sending the alert to everyone in the province, it would only be sent to people who are in areas close to where the person went missing.
In 2017, Manitoba changed its Missing Persons Act to allow police to issue alerts when a vulnerable person or an adult with a cognitive impairment is missing.
Despite these changes to provincial laws, there is no government funding for Silver Alerts, says Lili Liu, dean at the faculty of health at the University of Waterloo who researches Silver Alerts.
Police forces may post information on social media or issue press releases about missing seniors or vulnerable adults and call them Silver Alerts, she says. But in these cases, a “silver alert is no different than what the police already do with social media.”
Silver Alerts are often compared to Amber Alerts, but Amber Alerts are “completely different,” says Liu. Amber Alerts are broadcast across radio, television and cellphones, and are often sent out when police suspect a crime has been committed and a child has been abducted, she says.
Amber Alerts are also often province-wide, a feature that is not helpful when a missing person has dementia, says Michael Coyle, co-founder of BC Silver Alert, a volunteer organization that tracks missing person alerts to see if they mention seniors.
People with dementia are often found within a 10-to-13-kilometre radius of where they were last seen, says Coyle, who has been on volunteer search and rescue teams for more than 20 years. Silver Alerts need to target areas near where a person was last seen.
Timely information is key. “People with dementia, on average, if they’re not found in the first 48 hours, their chances drop precipitously,” he said. “Twenty-four hours is bad. Forty-eight hours is worse.”
People with dementia often walk in straight paths when they are lost, Coyle says. This means that knowing someone’s last location can help people know where to look.
Registries or GPS
Silver Alerts could be helpful, but there needs to be a focus on helping caregivers and the community find vulnerable seniors quickly, says Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Sinai Health in Toronto.
He recommends that people with dementia or other medical conditions register with vulnerable person registries. These registries, which exist in many municipalities, list people who may be more vulnerable if they get lost, or if there is an emergency. Police can check if missing persons are also on the vulnerable persons registry, and that may give them information to help find them.
GPS tracking devices can also help locate people quickly. In his experience, if the right tracking devices are used, people can be found before police are called, says Sinha.
“I’m not opposed to the idea of creation of a [Silver Alert] system,” he said. But he is concerned alerts could be so frequent, they would not be effective. “The question is, at what point do you trigger that alert system? What other measures can we put in place for people so that we can find other ways to track them down sooner and support them?”
Brundrit supports Silver Alerts but thinks people should be able to choose to receive them and that the alerts should be location specific. This makes them different from Amber Alerts, which people automatically receive even if they are not in the area.
In general, people have a lot of negative associations with dementia, says Brundrit. People who have dementia, and their caregivers, often feel isolated. She is concerned that if people receive a lot of alerts the negativity will grow.
“If we add anything more negative about [dementia], such as alert fatigue, we’re only going to increase the stigma and cause more isolation,” she said.
But she is glad there are organizations committed to keeping her mother, and others with dementia, safe. “It’s definitely comforting,” she said. “It feels like somebody cares.”
