Aged Care
Money cannot be used as an excuse for failure in aged care
Warren Ross AiN decries the use of budgetary excuses for the failures in the aged care sector.
For years, staffing ratios in many aged care facilities have been appallingly inadequate. Without sufficient staff, it is impossible to provide the level of service that families think their loved ones are receiving.
Since the Howard government’s Aged Care Act 1997, the federal government has sought to distance itself from responsibility for aged care outcomes. It is as though there is a deal between government and providers that the former gives the money, and the latter wears the odium for less-than-adequate service. This situation continued along happily until the ABC’s Four Corners exposed the extent of problems in the sector. Recent financial stresses have caused additional fractures to this arrangement.
Suddenly, we had a problem that someone had to own and then fix. Media, since the publication of the Aged Care Royal Commission’s final report, has focused on two issues.
Firstly, who is going to manage and implement the Commission’s recommendations? Commissioner Briggs called for a revised management structure to be developed within government; Commissioner Pagone wants government responding to a structure outside its control. I have eight hard-copy volumes from 1A to 4C to consume before I can form a valid opinion.
The second and most important issue is: where will the money come from? This issue will dog this debate unless we get a few things clear. Money cannot be used as an excuse for failure. The only true shortage can be of labour and resources. If we lack the staff needed to fill key roles, we must train them. If we lack the resources to support these staff, we must use money to obtain them. We have just seen through the recent COVID-19 crisis that money is not the problem if the battle is to save our economic system. The superficial financial needs of this system have been placed above our social needs for far too long.
The support I have seen in two community rallies I have been part of in the Blue Mountains showed us there is a strong will in communities to see these problems fixed. We now need to locate a comparable political will. Politicians who play games do so at their peril.