At a Queensland hospital last Wednesday, an elderly gentleman wanted to urinate. Politely, he asked the nurse for a bottle, common in hospitals and aged care homes that allow someone to go to the toilet from their bed.
The nurse told the 87-year-old that she was sorry, but there were only two of the $13 bottles for the entire public ward of the hospital. Was it possible for him to wait?
It’s only a little story, and doesn’t involve abuse or neglect or some of the other horrors that underline almost every page of the report into this nation’s care of the aged. But it goes to the heart of the public policy problem in 2021, whether it’s a state Labor government or a federal Coalition one.
Often it’s the little things that point to bigger problems. This is a big public hospital, and funding is so short that there are only two urination bottles for several people to share. The funding of our aged care — from facilities, to staff, to meals and individual care — is criminal, and Scott Morrison’s $450 million promise is just a drop in the ocean.
The royal commission has shown how home care, residential aged care, services and staff are all impacted by a system that is substandard and unsafe — an indictment on any community that claims to value its most vulnerable.
The commission’s 148 recommendations will serve as the roadmap we need to navigate a new system where our elderly are given back their dignity and allowed to live their final years with optimism and pride.
The government’s immediate promise to create a new act and commit immediate funds is welcome. But those alone won’t fix a system that is so broken that it has been the subject of a carousel of inquiries over recent decades.
What aged care needs is a heart. It needs our politicians to understand the pain of families who grapple with question after question on form after form required by aged care homes.
It needs politicians to wake up each morning wondering when their ailing parent will finally get a call that a place has been found for home care services or aged care placement.
It needs politicians to understand the empathy our aged care workers put into long days. It needs politicians to see and cry and be enraged by the lack of care afforded to some of our aged in the final years of life.
It’s easy to sit in Canberra and throw money around. But good policies comes from understanding those who are subject to them. It comes from action, not glib lines like “the inquiry we needed to have” and a commission that was a “harrowing process”. Tell us something we don’t know.
The way this has been handled is painfully familiar. Ignore the problem until you can’t any longer. Hold a review or two, maybe an inquiry. Ignore that. Promise funding, particularly if an election beckons. Pass the buck.
Being elected makes someone an MP, not an advocate for a better community. Becoming prime minister makes someone better at rising through the ranks than someone else; it doesn’t make for a good leader.
Across aged care — as well as child safety, employment, public health, crime and countless other areas — we need leadership that treats those at the centre of policy with empathy.
And denying a grandfather a $13 bottle to urinate in because our public health system can’t afford to help him shows more than a policy vacuum. It shows a lack of heart.
Have you or a family member had negative experiences with aged care? Let us know by writing to [email protected]. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
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“..and Scott Morrison’s $450 million promise is just a drop in the ocean.”
Especially when we consider the $444,000,000 that went to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation with no application process and the $498,000,000 given to the Australian War Memorial to pull down a design award winning Anzac Hall and replace it with a war toys theme park that is absolutely out of keeping with a memorial..
Excellent points, MJM.
Yes, indeed.
It’s going to be a long road back to where Age care should be at, all due to Howard & the LiarBrals cutting dollars & selling off age care homes to profit makers who don’t care about the people inside them, just the money/profit they can make. I really hope this gets better because I’m only a few years out before I’m shunted off into one of these homes. Politicians will have their massive pension to look after themselves, so they don’t give a rats. I detest these arse-hats for their selfishness & lack of empathy.
Almost time to bring out the guillotines!!!
During the Covid crisis there were reports that the jetsetting owners of one of the worst-affected Victorian facilities had gone off to Greece, or somewhere. Have they returned yet? Will they?
It seems Private Schools as noted elsewhere not only produce many male sexual abusers but also . . . conservative governments that do not support ‘public hospitals’ need to receive adequate funding? Surely said alumni could pass hat around and purchase two additional $15 bottles to be available on alternate days / wards??
Presumably one of the bottles was the male model, the other female?
Once the entire aged care system is overhauled to remove the profit motive in the system, maybe, the tax money supposedly going to aged care will not be siphoned off to pay bonuses, dividends and increased profits.
Maybe it will be used to get some decent food and staff, I know pie in the sky stuff.
Touché Mad Mick. Aged care was never great, but Howard and Costello with their blind neoliberal thinking decided that govt should be there to throw money at private for profit providers, and a little to non-profits and kill off the government sector.
Hopefully boomers will wake up to the fact that they will be filling these places soon enough, and perhaps vote for a government that might do something about it.
And perhaps not squeal like stuck pigs if a few tax rorts are pulled away from them to pay for it.
Can we be a little more circumspect with the word “reform”? Reform implies improvement. “Change” is a more accurate word.
I’m not sure reform need carry that connotation. Allegedly, when Mr Justice Astbury (1860-1939) was informed of the then British government’s intentions to reform some law, he responded “Reform! Reform! Aren’t things bad enough already?”
Only a pollie would pretend that “Reform implies improvement” – the aged sector being a prime example after the Rodent gifted it to Ramsay, Moran et al.
“… whether it’s a state Labor government or a federal Coalition one….”?
“Mitigating”/spreading it around, again?
It’s a ‘state (Labor)’ problem too?
When the Commonwealth has primary responsibility for the sector. When it was Howard’s “fine tuning to save money” that is basically at the core of scrimping in these virtual “poor houses” that has led to this decline and lingering misery?
For 18 of the last 24 years it’s been a federal Limited News Party festering bed sore – where (donor?) profits came before patient care.
State governments ONLY run aged care facilities under contract to the Federal Government. So it is entirely the responsibility of Morrison and his team.
My father had early onset dementia. He got in his car one day and disappeared. We didn’t know where he was, if he was alive or dead. He had driven until the car ran out of petrol and was found nearly 40 km from his home, 26 hours later. Up until that point, my mother, who was 71 at the time had been looking after Dad at home. He was beginning to get more difficult to look after and could get violent when he didn’t want to do something. So when the police found him and bought him home, with soiled clothes and no idea who we were or where he was, we made the difficult decision to find a place for him in an aged care home. We eventually found a permanent place after he spent 3 months in hospital. The home he was in was poorly staffed and the food was bad. Party pies and chips, puréed vegetables and meat, spaghetti bolognese that was inedible. He was in a dementia ward with about 30 other people. He would sit in a chair for most of the day, there was no garden, just a concrete area with some planters with dead plants in them. He spent his days in the ‘lounge’ with the other residents watching Andre Rieu videos and basically vegetating. Some of the staff were amazing, I cannot imagine how difficult a job it would be. But it became clear that most of the residents were being heavily medicated, including my father, as there was
usually only 1 staff member present most of the time. As Dad had other medical issues, he passed away in hospital from heart failure when he was admitted with pneumonia. We are thankful that he only had to spend 12 months in care as most people with Dementia often live with the disease for a decade or more. As a society we place little value on the elderly, we provide little respite for those who try to look after their loved ones at home, and we pay those who work in aged care so poorly, that we wonder why good people only last short periods of time in a high stress environment. $450 million won’t fix this shit fight. The whole system needs to be changed. It cannot be run by private business who only see profit for their shareholders, over the human beings who are in their care.
Jesus wept!
Sounds familiar, pretty much most of the centre’s are like this. Even without dementia it is a pretty frightful experience. I certainly never want to end up in one.
Andre Rieu videos, a particularly cruel and inhuman punishment.
“Practice for Purgatory.”