From Silence to Safer Care: Dignity & Inclusion for 2SLGBTQIA+ Older Adults
Content note: the interview discusses experiences of trauma,discrimination,
and other sensitive topics that may be distressing to some readers.
Dignity Seniors Society (DSS) is pleased to share an October, 2025 interview by Healthcare Excellence Canada with our Chair, Darren Usher! The piece is in honor of Canadian Patient Safety Week 2025. This year’s theme - All Voices for Safer Care - is an invitation to listen more deeply, ask important questions, and take meaningful action – together.
Some wounds never show on the surface. They live quietly in the way a person lowers their voice or glances around before speaking their truth. Darren Usher has dedicated himself to tending those invisible injuries, the ones left by decades of being silenced, shamed, and forgotten. As Chair of Dignity Seniors Society in British Columbia, he works with and for 2SLGBTQIA+ seniors to make care safer, more inclusive and rooted in dignity. For him, safety begins with connection – with being seen, heard, and free to be yourself. … Safety, he explains, grows with each person, shaped by trust, experience and care. “When care is culturally appropriate,” he adds, “ it becomes safer by default.
That belief underpins Dignity Seniors Society’s trauma-informed, strengths-based approach – especially through We Are Familee, a volunteer-led initiative that helps 2SLGBTQIA+ older adults to age in place, supported in part by Healthcare Excellence Canada through the Enabling Aging in Place collaborative.
“It’s about not making the participant fit your program, but making your program fit the participant,” Darren explains. “It requires flexibility. You build around the person’s pace and needs, not the volunteer’s schedule.”
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For Darren, the work is both personal and collective – an act of repair and of possibility. Each conversation, each act of care, helps rebuild trust in systems that once caused harm. He knows change takes time. But he also sees proof every day that it’s happening – in the voices that no longer whisper, and in the quiet certainty that no one should have to hide to be cared for.
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Read the complete interview here! DSS is grateful for funding generously provided by Healthcare Excellence Canada!