Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk today about an issue that is becoming increasingly critical in my electorate—that is, aged care and the lack of beds within our homes and hostels for the aged. This week I received a telephone call from an expert source within the Rockhampton region aged-care sector. This person is deeply concerned at the increasing number of aged people waiting to get a place in an aged-care facility. The source reported that the Rockhampton Base Hospital has a number of elderly people in its rehabilitation unit waiting for an aged-care place. The term that was used was ‘crisis point’. Apparently, there has been a great influx of patients into the Rockhampton Base Hospital over the past six months and the situation has become critical.

These patients can remain in these units for only 35 days, after which they must be either placed with an aged-care provider or sent home. The problem with this is that these patients cannot go home for a number of reasons. Typically, they cannot go home as they do not have anyone to care for them there. In one particular case recently, the individual’s carer had passed away, leaving the individual with no-one to care for them and no alternative but to go into aged care.

There are well over 11,000 people in my electorate aged 70 years and over. While many of these may currently be cared for by family, there will come a time when most of those not already placed in aged-care facilities will need to access them. It is imperative that there are adequate facilities to ensure that these people are not left out in the cold when they most need our assistance.

In a meeting that I had with aged-care providers earlier this year, it was made abundantly clear that there is a shortage of all types of beds, as well as extended aged care at home and community aged-care packages in our region. Providers told me of numerous people waiting in hospital beds for aged-care places, with one person even having spent three months languishing in a hospital bed due to the unavailability of aged-care places. A quick phone call to a couple of local aged-care providers today determined that all had waiting lists, ranging from 12 at Bethesda, 40 at Shalom and a whopping 84 at Eventide. A number of providers commented on the number of individuals waiting for places in hospital beds that could be better used for acute care cases. Providers also spoke generally of the huge unmet demand in the area, with one provider stating that there was a 30 per cent deficit in beds in the local region.

In June, Labor announced a plan to create up to 2,000 transition-care beds for older Australians who are currently waiting in hospital beds for an aged-care place. Our plan included an investment of $158 million for these beds and a further $300 million of zero interest loans to aged-care providers to make available up to 2,500 permanent residential aged-care beds. We are committed to getting our elderly people out of hospital and into appropriate aged-care places. This not only ensures that these individuals are receiving the care that they need and deserve but makes the hospital beds available for the use of the general public, as they were designed. Labor is out there listening to the needs of ordinary Australians, while the government plays catch-up on this and so many other issues.

We know that, in the last 11 years, the current federal government has turned a net surplus of 3,217 aged-care beds into a national shortfall of 2,735, as at December 2006. The Productivity Commission’s Report on government services indicates that waiting times for entry into residential aged care have increased over the period from 2000 to 2006. Today, more than 28 per cent of people who have been assessed as requiring a bed wait three months or more to move into residential care, compared with 15 per cent in 2000. In August 2006 there were about 2,300 older Australians in public hospitals who should have been in residential aged care, as recommended by an aged-care assessment team.

The current shortfall of aged-care beds is 2,735. If this shortfall were addressed, there would be beds for all those older Australians left, inappropriately, in a hospital bed. While older Australians are well cared for in hospital, acute care facilities are not equipped to provide the social interactions and personal environment that contribute to their quality of life. It is an absolute outrage that individuals cannot be allocated an aged-care place because there are none available. These people require care that they cannot receive at home and are in need of assistance immediately. I call on the government to act now on this matter and allow the aged people of Central Queensland the opportunity to receive quality care in an aged-care facility.