On aged care

In this week’s coming news post is the following: 

a police officer has been charged (remember: innocent until proven guilty) (TND) following the death of an elderly woman after she fell and was injured after being tasered (TND) - which has also led to calls for reviews (TG) of a number of aspects of the incident (the inadequate training of aged care staff in other states is one of those matters - in my home state such work requires a lengthy period of training and ongoing certification);

I’ve been working on a post on aged care for some time - which is to say, I started it, but pt it down to the bottom of the barrel of priorities.

In view of the preceding, I’ve decided to finish an abbreviated version of this. In doing so, please note that I have a friend and a relative working in the aged care sector, in different states. The friend is in this state, and he has commented on the training they have at handling incidents such a residents being armed, which is often to wait them out - make sure no-one else is at risk, but de-escalate the situation, and the resident/patient, particularly if they have dementia, will simply forget what they were doing, and wonder why they have a knife. 

That, of course, takes time, and lack of time is one of the inevitable consequences after the neolibs privatised so much aged care in the 90s and 00s. 

At that time I had a colleague who was pushing for that privatisation, who became an auditor: he had an exclusive focus on physical minutiae, and an absolute incompetence on emotional issues - in general, not only in the context of aged care. He had no care for the emotional wellbeing of older people, and admitted that to me in several conversations, glibly dismissing that as something for family to take care of in infrequent visits. 

That shows the problems of having emotionally scarred people making decisions for/about other people. 

The new system, as we found out when looking at aged care for my adoptive father (in another state, not my home state), is also horrendously expensive. 

I’ll come back to costs, but the issue I want to examine now is that of adequate time for staff to do their tasks. Comments I’ve had from a number of people over the years related to inadequate time, which commonly goes back to nurse/staff ratios (numbers of staff per patient) being too low, but there is also the neoliberal fallacy of treating worn out economic cogs (i.e., older people) cogs as if they are units in a factory farm to be processed in a time-efficient manner - wake-wash-feed-nominal entertainment-bed, with no genuine human interaction. 

It contrasts badly with human decency -particularly those supermarkets overseas which have introduced slow check outs for older people to have chats in. 

These problems were made very apparent by the Royal Commission into Aged Care - see here (ABC), here, here, here, here, and here.

Coming out of that were a few key points: 

• aged care facilities in the Commonwealth arena, which had been largely privatised, were the concern, which many state run facilities retaining staff ratios, etc; 
• the problems were, IMO, largely the privatisation pigeons coming home to roost;
  
• the right and proper solution considered/adopted by Albanese (Commonwealth) government includes nurse ratios.
  

The response to this was whingeing by the private sector that they could not make a profit - see here. 

Well, this shows the limits of privatisation/neoliberalism: caring and human decency cannot be reduced to a dollar value, just as the environment cannot be reduced to a dollar value lest we go extinct. 

The solution to the problem of aged care facilities going broke or at risk of going broke is take them back into the public sector - where, in my opinion, they should always have been.

 

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