Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

It has been a bright idea to care for people at home.  My parents - both 83 and still quite mobile and with it - use this service.

The person comes once every two weeks.  My mother isn't the most house proud of women, but she does find this woefully inadequate.  The appointments have been changed about 30% of the time.  The vacuum cleaner had to be replaced because the rubber around the connection had perished.  They don't do a number of things - like the laundry: but it is this kind of heavy lifting that is most needed.  And the attitude of most seems to be: you should be grateful that I am doing this for you.  It was a good idea.  The execution has turned it into just another piece of chaos that my parents cope with.  They don't quit the scheme because they don't want the supervisor to think that they are complaining about the person doing the cleaning.

We need some serious new thinking to be done about this issue.  Sponsoring neighbourhood walking clubs would be a start.  There are so many simple and useful things that could be done!

John: This is an issue that I think quite a bit about, especially as each year passes and one feels that much older. I agree it is going to be an even bigger crisis in the not too distant future. 

Times have changed. There is greater mobility amongst the younger generation. Many of the thirties something children of my peers are now living much further away from the family home, even overseas and raising their families there. They will not be so available to their parents as we were to ours. Not only that they are having their babies much later, so still have toddlers at foot as we enter our twilight years. By the time they are free of parental duties we will probably have more than one foot in the grave. So no point looking in their direction for aged care, much as they protest that they will be there for us.  

Then there is the effect of the lower birthrate. My parents and most of my elderly aunts and uncles, now gone were all cared for at home by one or more of the children. Families were bigger and the caring could be shared. Not any more. Pardon the pun, but we did not breed enough chickens to come home to roost.

So the pressure on age care facilities is going to skyrocket over the next two decades as you point out. It won't be just facilities that are short, it will be qualified staff. Caring for the aged is not an easy job and requires a special kind of person to do it for a career. I nursed in an aged care facility for a year. It was an endless round of feeding, washing and heavy lifting of often incontinent people who in many cases had no will to live on. I found it quite depressing work and I was always dog tired at the end of the shift.  

When there is such a skills shortage across the whole work spectrum, I would think real incentives will have to be offered to entice young people toward such physically demanding work.

We can build homes and put beds in them, but without the nurses we will have the situation alread facing many general hospitals, wards closed for lack of staff. Certainly not for lack of patients needing a bed.

It is a very sorry situation.  My friends and I have discussed this between us and we figure that as we all age, we may have to look at group houses where we care for each other for as long as we can. Sort of leaving home to live in the group house revisited.

I think we do have to come up with created solutions as to how we can best care for ourselves and each other for as long as possible.

In the ACT you have to pay land tax on the floor space size if you have a granny flat attached to your house that is rented out. That for a start should ge lifted.

Another issue is the cross subsidising that occurs where a person is unable to manage his or her financial affairs and those affairs are placed under management. In NSW that can be by an appointed private manager, or by the Office of the Protective Commissioner. In other states the system is much the same I understand. The trouble is the NSW Government requires that Office to be primarily self funding. So a family can put half a million dollars under the control of that Office to pay for the care of a disabled or aged relative, only to find there are very heavy fees payable, simply because that Office has many clients who have no resources other than the age or disability pension. So the better off clients are required to effectively subsidise those who cannot pay.

This means that a fund set up for a person's aged care can run down a lot faster than one might otherwise expect. I think that system is seriously flawed and I would caution anyone thinking in that direction in regard to an aged parent, to think again.

Australia's ageing population, coupled with the fact that more people are living in their own homes for longer and entering residential care later, means we are already seeing a shift in demand towards high level aged care.

There are currently 1.9 million Australians aged 70 years and over, who make up 9.3 per cent of the total population. This number will double in the next 20 years as the baby boomers reach old age. There are also currently more than 200,000 Australians living with dementia. This number is also expected to double within the next 20 years.

The need for more high level residential aged care is therefore going to continue to grow at an increasing rate well into the future.

With the number of Australians over 70 set to increase to nearly 4 million by 2028 and the number of people suffering from dementia to be over 400.000 it is easy to see why we need to be building more aged residential facilities and training more staff now. 

Minister for Ageing Justine Elliot said

"It is also about preparing Australia for the challenges of the 21st century and our nation's long-term needs," she said.

"Australia is facing a demographic shift. Australians now have one of the world's longest life expectancy rates, outliving Swedes, Norwegians and Finns.

"An Australian born today can expect to live to reach 80.9 years of age; it is 78.5 years for a man and 83.3 for a woman."

Within 40 years, the number of people aged over 65 will almost triple - from 2.8 million today to about 7.2 million in 2047, or from about 13 per cent of the population to more than 25 per cent.

After the initial $150 million is invested for up to 1250 residential aged-care places, Ms Elliot said, a review and evaluation of the program would occur within 18 months to determine the implementation arrangements for the remaining 1250 places.

1250  Residential aged-care places is nowhere near what is needed that would not even fill the need in Cairns.