The election is just around the corner and Anthony Albanese has put aged care on the menu in Australia. I would like to extend the restaurant analogy a bit further in looking at the aged care situation in this nation. Governments set up the current aged care system back in the 1990s. Private operators were encouraged to enter this sector with generous financial rules and regulations put in place. Property developers have made solid profits over the subsequent decades via the real estate component of the sector. The actual care provided to older Australians within the live-in system has been far from ideal, however.
Violent & Drugged Aged Care in Australian Facilities
Successive enquires culminating with a Royal Commission exposed the endemic problems within the aged care sector.
Older Australians being drugged and beaten into submission by those working in the facilities, which are chronically understaffed, were on the menu in bold type.
The workers in this sector are underpaid, both nurses and carers. It was made shockingly clear that vulnerable older Australians were, in many cases, not better off in the care of these facilities. In fact, the staff and nurse to inmates ratio was, often, woefully inadequate. The industry and the medical establishment have actively promoted placing elderly Australians within these aged care facilities.
Images Of Aged Care Travesties Committed on Vulnerable Australians
The outraged middle-aged children of these vulnerable older individuals living in these aged care facilities placed hidden cameras inside their rooms. These captured the neglect and sometimes violent interaction between aged care workers and their parents. Poorly paid and trained carers resorting to physical violence in their management of those elderly people in their care were exposed via footage of their heinous acts.
The aged care facilities were not even spending enough money on food per inmate to provide meals of a reasonable standard.
Dining Out in Aged Care No Stars Here
I return to the restaurant analogy here because we pay specialists in hospitality when we choose to go out for dinner. The similarity is that a restaurant caters for multiple diners, as do aged care facilities with their live-in residents. We go out to dinner with the expectation that, although, the cooks and hospitality staff are preparing and serving lots of meals they will do it better than what is served up at home. It is factoring in the economic rule that specialisation will produce not only more cost-effective results but products of a consistently higher standard. The findings of the Royal Commission into aged care have debunked this expectation and delivered no stars for the industry on this basis.
You will not get a great dining experience eating at a restaurant with too few trained staff. Indeed, if we correlate the restaurant’s head chef with the aged care facility’s registered nurse, as the fulcrum at the centre of the operation, the importance of nurses becomes crystal clear.
Outsourcing the care of your elderly parents or relatives to these aged care facilities is a high-risk strategy if your expectation is that they will be better off. The cooks and staff in these restaurants are not serving up five-star fare, indeed, food poisoning is a far likelier outcome. The Morrison government has failed to redress the problems in the aged care sector. They have backed the existing system and their party has historic links to the private interests within this industry.
There is a labour shortage in the aged care sector, but the government is not backing substantial wage increases here.
Australia has an ongoing problem with not paying adequate wages for sectors like aged care. We have relied on the exploitation of overseas workers to do the bulk of this work. Australia does too much on the cheap, not investing nearly enough money in training, and not valuing the people doing this complex and sensitive work.
Australia does not value the care of your elderly parents. Unless, we as Australians, do something about this, it will continue on generation after generation.
If we do not pay for a high-quality service in aged care, we will not receive this care for our parents and loved ones.
I would like to make clear that there are committed and capable individuals working in aged care. There are just not enough of them, and they are not paid well enough to encourage more of them. Unless the economic settings are really changed to recognise their importance within our society, we will continue to suffer third rate results in this sector. You and I will be inside one of these facilities sooner or later, perhaps, this might prompt action on this matter when you cast your vote in the coming federal election. If you don’t care, no one will care for you, when the time comes.
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