I am a Recreation Activity Officer (RAS) at a (large) nursing home. This home has a mixture of hostel and nursing home accommodation. I work two 6.5hr days per week for $17 per hour (care service employee grade 2 + 3% negotiated in an AWA 2007). The management restructured all staff's working weeks to 6.5hr days around 3 yrs ago...

They have a huge kitchen area but also outsourced meal production at the same time and the meals the residents get often look like pureed grey mounds of unidentifiable food. We have just lost a full-time diversional therapist who has gone on to better pastures within the organisation. This person had 38 hrs per week as the contract arranged between management and them could not be altered when the restructuring took place.

Now, however, management have said they are not going to replace that diversional therapist. There is only one diversional therapist left working 32 and a half hrs per week and 3 other part-time RAOs besides me. Some residents will have no activities at all on some days.

They will sit around a small TV room for hours and it will be like being in "God's waiting room" as one of them said to me. Nursing staff now have to deliver newspapers and mail to residents which was our job before.

Before, we RAOs would have time to open and read letters and birthday cards to visually impaired or confused residents. I doubt that nursing staff will be able to spare this time. I have been given new tasks with out being trained for them and then yelled at by the RN for asking questions.

I have been expected to run from one end of the facility to the other doing two tasks at once. I am a mature woman. I am appalled to find out from your site and the official accreditation site that there is no Australian legal staffing levels ratios in nursing homes and that management can cut staff at their discretion as long as their paperwork looks good and no-one says anything out of turn when the accreditation visitor calls.

I am expected to bring the dedication and skill of a psychologist to the assessment of residents for the lifestyle section in their files. From this I must work out the resident's problems and needs and write a care plan for their leisure requirements. After that I have to evaluate whether it is working and adjust it if it is not! My two page job description actually includes that I must "conduct therapy sessions to improve residents' mental and physical well-being".

I have a Masters of Art Therapy and this is their cheap way of trying to get my expertise for next to nothing. I read in the Feb 2008 newsletter "The Standard" put out by the accreditation agency that "Creativity proves valuable in dementia care". This article is about the use of art therapy in quality dementia care. I have not got a hope in hell of getting the management where I work to employ me and pay me as an art therapist.

Yet if they did I would really have scope to help people. There's the crunch! The recreational staff have it easy compared to the personal care staff and the nurses but still it is bad economics to reduce the staff in any section if resident well-being is the main criteria. The fact that the new funding instrument ACFI appears to give more funding for more frail residents means that the less frail ones are the losers.

You are right! There is a crisis in aged care. What can we do?