Our approaching care crisis
Every time I read, listen to or watch the news I am confronted by stories about the extremely dire state of our healthcare services.
Hospitals inundated and earthquake-prone, a workforce decimated, GPS overloaded and aged care facilities withdrawing beds.
Usually – almost always – when the health system comes under pressure, it’s our older and more vulnerable communities, like those living with dementia, who are hardesthit.
And that’s certainly the case now. The existing health system crisis has left people living with dementia ignored, forgotten and needing to fend for themselves. And that’s made worse because New Zealand’s dementia services have been neglected for so many years.
The next healthcare crisis is already brewing
But if you think things are bad now (and they are), spare a thought for our next healthcare crisis. It’s coming as surely as Christmas, death and taxes.
It’s a crisis that could possibly be avoided if our politicians and policymakers could find a way of balancing the immediate and the urgent with the need to think about the longer-term important issues that are already starting to make their presence felt.
Because that next healthcare crisis is already brewing, the impacts are even now starting to be felt, and I’m not sure we, as a country, have time now to avoid its full effects.
This next healthcare crisis is coming in the shape of our rapidly ageing population.
New Zealanders are ageing at an unprecedented rate and will need more help from our healthcare system as they do.
In just six years, New Zealand will have a population that includes 1 million people aged over 65, and not long after that 25% of the population will be over 65.
And I am deeply concerned that we are not shaping and resourcing our existing healthcare system, which can hardly cater for existing demand, to meet the significantly greater demands coming down the track as the growing numbers of older people require a much greater share of the healthcare pie.
If we think our health services are under strain now, give it another 15-20 years and see what happens when approximately one in four New Zealanders is aged over 65.
An unfortunate, but largely ignored, side effect of an ageing population, especially one that’s ageing as rapidly as ours, is the growing numbers of people with dementia.
And New Zealanders living with dementia, and their care partners and families, have to rely heavily on a healthcare system that’s simply not geared up to support them.
The system can’t cope now with the 70,000 New Zealanders estimated to have dementia. How, then, is it ever going to cope when dementia numbers in New Zealand nearly triple in coming years as they are projected to? Implementing the Dementia Mate Wareware Action Plan that has been developed by and for the dementia community and endorsed by Cabinet is an important first step. Because without it, what is already a dementia challenge facing our struggling healthcare system will quickly become a dementia crisis that will threaten to overwhelm that system.
We all know that it’s hard to get staff now, and aged care has a particular problem – what about when the working age population shrinks – who will be caring for our parents then, and how will aged care services compete with all the other sectors who also need staff?
What about the impact of things like increasing poverty, homelessness and the digital divide for older people?
And these changes will hit Māori, Pacific, and Asian communities particularly hard because those populations are ageing at a faster rate than the general population, so we need to be ready.
Are we? And are we preparing in a way that will be fair to everyone and create equitable outcomes for both older people and younger people?