An older person is lying in a hospital bed tonight who doesn’t need to be there. They’re well enough to leave but the aged care place that should be waiting for them doesn’t exist.
More than 3,700 older Australians are in exactly that position in a nation-wide ‘bed blocking’ crisis. Another 200,000 are waiting for an assessment or Support at Home funding. Each number is a person, and usually a family, waiting on a phone call.
Ageing Australia says the wait has gone on long enough. The national peak body for aged care providers went to Canberra last week with more than 50 of its members. They met with ministers, shadow ministers and parliamentarians from across the political divide. The aim was immediate action as well as longer-term investment.
CEO Tom Symondson says older Australians “are waiting far too long for the care promised to them” and hospitals are “increasingly filled with older people with nowhere else to go”. Providers, he says, are “struggling to keep existing services running, let alone build the new capacity we desperately need”.
What’s driving the squeeze
The sharpest pressure point is residential care funding.
The Government recently lifted AN-ACC funding by 2.55 per cent, below both inflation and wage increases. Ageing Australia says this leaves providers with costs rising faster than the funding meant to cover them. It also says more than 3,600 planned residential beds are now shelved or at risk.
Symondson calls the increase “laughably inadequate”. He points to the Government’s $1.4 billion underspend in last year’s aged care budget and says “there is literally no excuse”.
By his numbers, that money would double the increase to the 5 per cent the sector needs. It would still leave enough to fund more than 30,000 new Support at Home packages. He calls it “simply a question of political will”, not ability.
For operators and boards, the shelved beds are the part that lingers. A bed not built this year is not there in three years, when the people who need it are already on a waiting list.
The asks
Ageing Australia wants action on two timelines. Straight away:
- An AN-ACC increase of at least 5 per cent
- A 3.5 per cent increase to the hotelling supplement
- The planned $5 accommodation supplement increase brought forward, and
- Urgent action to cut Support at Home waitlists and end the rationing of approved care.
Symondson says the short-term measures “will give providers some breathing room, but they’re not the long-term solution”.
For that, the sector wants a national aged care investment plan supporting around 10,000 additional residential beds each year. “We need a long-term plan that gives providers the confidence to invest and expand, but we also need decisions now that stop things getting worse,” he says.
Aged care is everyone’s business
The campaign is deliberately cross-party. “We don’t care what side of politics you’re on, and neither do the older Australians waiting for services,” Symondson says.
He points back to the Royal Commission, which he says made the point clear. Older Australians, he says, “shouldn’t have to wait for the next election or the next Budget to get the care they need”.
For the person in that hospital bed, the next Budget is a long way off.
