A crisis is building that we all must understand. Hundreds of thousands of older Australians are already alone at home with no aged care support.
Our sister media business (DCM Group) reports daily on home care and residential aged care, which the government historically funds, but no more.
In simple terms, thanks to the baby boomers, the number of older Australians is swamping the system and the government can’t keep up with the cash.
Today there are over 200,000 people waiting for home care. That is support in the home to allow them to live in their home safely. Imagine that, a person in their early 80s who has been identified by their doctor or a hospital, as needing support and they are not getting it.
Worse is that the 220,000 aged care beds we have in Australia are now all occupied. If you need one urgently, it is unlikely you will get it. Which explains why there are 4,500 people in hospital beds waiting to be transferred to an aged care bed (1,300 in NSW) but there are none available.
The cost to taxpayers is $1,800 a day for a hospital bed compared to $400 a day for an aged care bed.
But more importantly, an older person in a hospital bed deteriorates fast compared to the tailored services of an aged care bed.
The photograph at the top is Olivier Chretien, CEO of Australia’s largest not-for-profit aged care provider, Bolton Clark. He says Bolton Clark wants to build more aged care homes but the government funding arrangement means they would lose money on every new aged care bed they could build. They won’t build any more beds until this changes.
The Minister for Health, Mark Butler, states regularly in the media that we need a new aged care home every three days for the next 20 years but it is not providing the funding for it.
The government already spends $50 billion a year on aged care. The baby boomers mean they might need another $50 billion a year within five years. They haven’t got that cash.
It takes five to seven years to build a new aged care home. This means even if the government was to make more funds available, the current crisis is only going to get worse because new people are entering the system every day.
In summary we can’t expect government-funded aged care to be available when you need it. That is like saying there won’t be a hospital when you need one in an emergency. It is this critical.
The only solution is prevention. We all need to invest in our physical and mental health such that we don’t need to go into aged care. This means strength training and keeping ourselves socially fit with people around us.
We can live then independently at home, safely.
This is why we created Monday Club.
