Sunday, 18 January 2009 14:21 |
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During the January holiday period, it was reported in one of the broadsheets that, due to the global financial crisis, more families would be seeking residential care for aged relatives. This, explained the journalist, was because families under pressure would not be able to run around looking after Mum. Too costly in both time and money! Thus, he opined, aged care would be one of the few areas which would actually be expanding its workforce and therefore a sector for the unemployed to keep in mind. Who knows on what basis this prediction was made? Most likely on the basis of having to fill news space during the boring holiday period. But I am totally tired of aged care being seen as the sector to help solve unemployment or as a means of expanding the guest worker 457 visa program. It’s not that unemployed people or guest workers could not be good carers – it’s about doing things the right way and for the right reason. There certainly needs to be an expansion of the aged-care workforce. Right now! Week after week this web site receives correspondence from families and aged-care staff who are shocked and dismayed about the low staffing levels in our aged-care homes. For example, just this last week a subscriber to the on-line forum commented on how the Minister’s office actually believes that it is OK for just 2 staff to feed more than 20 high-care residents. She writes, "I've just received a reply from the Minister’s office with the result of a complaint about (an) aged care facility. The issue was staff cuts leaving 2 staff to feed more than 20 residents. Apart from the fact that meal times are one of the few markers of the day for those in residential care, there are numerous reports indicating high levels of malnutrition in our aged-care homes. And we wonder why! Would Justine Elliot, her advisers or the bureaucrats in the Department of Health and Ageing really like to be on the receiving end of such a situation – or be one of the two harried staff members trying to feed all these residents? Two things need to happen immediately:
Plenty of studies of the aged-care workforce have been undertaken:
Several issues were identified including the fact that a high proportion of residential care workers were unhappy with their pay as well as with the amount of time allocated to them to care for their residents. I have no idea whether the broadsheet journalist was right or not about more people placing relatives in residential aged care during hard times. But I do know that the current aged-care staffing arrangements are a mess. It is time to bring the three R’s into aged care:
And then, maybe, there will be someone around to feed me my lunch when my time comes. Newer articles:
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yes, we need experienced care workers..with qualifications. but months of studying for these qualifications equal little or no more pay. its disgusting that i can get more in chicken treat than i can as a qualified aged care worker..exposed to diseases and infections as well as abusive or metal ill clients. we are on the front line of care. no wonder no body wants to stay working there, aged care workers should not have to work out of the goodness of there heart, but under these conditions only the ones that do stay
I would like to think that homes are responsible to, and connected with, their own communities. This is far more likely to happen in country towns. I know that where I was brought up in country Victoria, the whole community was proud of the local nursing home. People had contributed in various ways to its development. They visited their friends and relatives there and knew that they themselves might end up there. Here in the city it is not so clear. People often can't get a place in facilities close to home. And so they often end up in these huge places built on cheap land on the fringes of the city (bushfire zones?).
Like you, Wanda, I am dismayed by the ongoing take-over by corporate players. Does economy of scale always make for better care. I don't think so! But then again some of those nursing homes in crumbly old mansions set up by small private operators weren't so hot either.
The Columnist.
They (the providers) have to undertake benchmarking to meet the continuous improvement requirements of accreditation. Why benchmarking? Because that’s the corporate thing, and – though the public would wish otherwise – pretty much all political action over the past decade has been focused on one thing, preparing hundreds of community, church and small private aged care facilities for eventual takeover by corporate players. You are blaming the providers and demanding that government cracks down on them. But it is government that manipulates the staffing levels.
There are no political solutions to what ails aged care – because politics is the problem.
From innocuous beginnings (Gough Whitlam whispering in the early 1970s: ‘Would you all like free health care?’) we have allowed health and ageing to become grossly over-politicised.
Staffing levels generally would improve should providers ever become free again to choose them – because becoming free again would inevitably mean becoming answerable again to their communities, rather than to a blindingly expensive and ineffective government accreditation agency.