Current Reality
Methodist Homes for the Aged (Eastern Cape) provides paid-for accommodation and caring to qualifying retirees in Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth); there are six ‘independent living’ villages, an ‘assisted living’ apartment block, and two ‘frail care’ homes.
We have an enviable reputation, we are efficiently managed, provide attractive accommodation choices and loving care, and there is a long waiting list; we must surely be doing most of the right things in the right way!
But this is not a simple ‘happily ever after’ fairy tale. As much as MHA endeavours to establish in advance that incoming residents can pay their way, the sad reality is that more and more of our residents, across all our facilities, are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, to pay the monthly levies and frail care costs, and still have income on which to live. Some of our residents are approaching destitution, some are already there.
Many factors are at play here. Perhaps there were some poor investment/retirement planning or spending decisions, ongoing rampant inflation, material support from family dries up or doesn’t exist, and sometimes it’s just a case of outliving one’s income. This is the reality, here and across the world; we cannot sugarcoat this.
We are aware of organizations which offer some or all of what we offer but operate on the basis that “If you can’t pay, you can’t stay”. In its four decades of existence, MHA has never resorted to this harsh measure. However, our heartfelt and generous approach comes at a significant cost. Subsidizing or writing off levies and other expenses, particularly in frail care, costs MHA millions of rands, and the number of cases and the financial impact of that increases annually. We cannot sugarcoat this fact either; since 2017 MHA’s financial support of those in our two Frail Care homes exceeds R6 million, has now almost reached the R1 million per year mark, and we anticipate that this will grow by at least 10% annually.
For many years MHA maintained a “Residents’ Assistance Fund” and a “Frail Care Assistance Fund”, and in general any bequests or donations received found their way into one or the other fund, to be used to help alleviate the financial plight of a resident. Both those funds have been depleted, and our financial model (cottage/apartment pricing, subsidized Levies, refund) cannot sustain the projected levels of assistance indefinitely. Therefore, the MHA Board decided that a strategy be developed to provide for those MHA residents who have genuinely fallen on hard times financially.