A survey of aged care providers reveals little confidence in the government’s response to the aged care royal commission’s recommendations, with a particular concern about severe staff shortages.
The survey, conducted by the Australian Aged Care Collaboration — composed of religious and some for-profit residential aged care providers — provides some predictable responses.
Greater regulation of service providers is seen as “duplicative and burdensome”, “more red tape, more compliance”. Providers are in a hurry for more money to start flowing into the sector from late next year.
But the vexed issue of the workforce is the area with the lowest confidence about successful implementation. Providers, dependent on set levels of government funding, have limited capacity to fund the significant increase in wages of aged care nurses and personal care workers everyone agrees is needed to attract and retain more workers to a sector that faces big increases in demand in coming years.
Among the responses on the workforce issue are comments like: “we are at the stage of not accepting new HCP clients in some areas”; “without staff no amount of increased HCP (home care package) funding will support our ageing population”; “I just cannot stress enough the need to attract staff to the aged care workforce”.
The survey is critical of the government for failing to join the union case for a significant rise in wages that has been before the Fair Work Commission for over a year without material progress — there won’t even be any hearings until mid-2022.
Much of the delay has been caused by a lack of information about employees, with extensive discussion between the unions and the government over worker classifications and census data that could be used to inform the case.
The overall result is that aged care’s biggest problem, its workforce, continues to plague the sector as paper circulates between lawyers about the one thing everyone says is needed to address the problem: higher pay.
Being an aged carer is a very hard job, both physical and mental. Physically, in spite of all the lifting machinery (demeaning and embarrassing to the resident) in the real world of aged care there is simply not enough time (or practised skill) to always use it. You use your body. Mentally, well you try working a shift in a dementia unit, and not go home feeling at the end of your tether. Especially when there is never, ever the staffing levels needed to make the job bearably civilised, for both residents and staff. Yet, unbelievably, it is one of the country’s lowest paid jobs.
I suggest a levy on the wages and assets of those whose employment delivers the least valuable contributions to society and the community, yet who pay themselves the most – CEOs, senior executives, bankers, corporate barristers and all those other overpaid leaners. Let’s call it income tax, stop constantly cutting it, and redistribute it for the good of the commonweal.
[Yes, I did some stints in aged care, but thankfully not for my entire working life.]
This problem will be solved with a very familiar formula by federal and state governments, increase immigration to fill job vacancies. The people who fill the vacancies are motivated and good at the job, English is the main other language taught in schools around the world.
The fact that these new arrivals come from a completely different culture with often very different expectations and values/history/ natural/political environment is not the fault of the worker.
Common decency does however cross language and cultural barriers and successful applicants to permanent positions have this and are skilled intuitive workers.
An interesting side effect is that older people who have been prejudice or bigoted are now in a position where this behaviour is brought into question, being dragged into the 21 century.
The biggest issue in Aged care is trying to fit person centred care legislation into accreditation protocol. One way this can be done is employing more people checking compliance and nurses/carers, admin.
Increased training is happening and ongoing in the better facilities including those privately run.
Person centred care requires listening which of course takes longer and requires levels of trust and relationship development skills, this comes naturally to most people in the industry but there isn’t easily time allocated for the fluid nature of this aspect of caring.
Although when an elder is in need of someone to listen to them who can advocate for them, there are protocols that are waiting to assist and they are implemented by the better facilities.
Recently trained people are immediately compromised by following the course outlines and what it means in the real world,- listening while leaving more of the practical workload to the more experienced workers which of course leads to understandable resentment for the experienced and the possibility of developing guilt complexes/job satisfaction issues for the newly trained person and vicaversa.
There are only a few seasoned and new gems that can do both and it is very easy to kid yourself.
With elders life expectancy of a few months because people now stay at home longer, burnout is quite prevalent and this adds a serious complexity, there is support available and promoted. It also is an important factor for the longer term residents, a high turnover of new potential friends in poor health.
This is where the neocon vision of Capitalism grapples with meeting human frailty on a very basic level, the publicly/privately owned facilities have faced meeting the expectations of the act which commenced July 2018 and both have had to deal with Covid.
Wages and funding
is another example of the intrinsic selfishness of the puppet masters and unwitting followers of neocon ideology/dogma clashing with reality,- pollution, environmental degradation,bushfires, climate change, peoples preparedness to go into lockdown/ make allowances for the pandemic- the common good.
Regulate and legislate media so that all information isn’t at the mercy of the economic rationalist neoliberal ideology/ dogma owner majority as it has been for the last 40 years and change the countries outlook for the better immediately.
Politics is completely at the mercy of the owners of mainstream media information outlets, that is not a democracy, as Bernard has stated before our system is crony Capitalism.
And also in disability care. I know someone over 65 (and therefore not on NDIS, but on Disability Support for Older Australians) who lost her regular careworker (who refused to be Covid vaxed), and the support agency is struggling to get a replacement after two weeks. Not helped by the privatised system of lots of different agencies, all with a small pool of workers.
More pay: more staff. Pay should be more than nursing.