Care doled out in minutes

Home care visits for the elderly are being eroded, with visits being calculated to the ‘‘nth degree’’.

Care workers and their elderly clients are paying the price for home visit times being slashed, say their unions – the PSA and E tu¯ – which both blame a systematically underfunded sector.

The PSA union said it received dozens of complaints a week from care workers for district health board-contracted providers, including Nurse Maude, Access Community Health, Healthcare NZ and Geneva.

More than 100 care workers for Nurse Maude home care service, which covers Canterbury, Wellington and Lower Hutt, and Nelson/Marlborough, have complained about the provider, with many claiming cutbacks in visit times, some without reassessment of clients.

Home care workers felt unable to provide the necessary care in the reduced times allocated for each elderly client and many were giving up their own time to do the job properly – or giving up the job entirely.

Elderly clients felt ‘‘powerless’’ in their attempts to reclaim the minutes slashed off their visits.

Mary Singleton, an 82-year-old from Raumati, said her support worker told her just before Christmas that her 45-minute visits twice a week had been slashed to 39 minutes at a time.

‘‘No justification, no explanation.’’

These 39 minutes were to be broken down to 13 minutes of vacuuming and washing floors, as well as cleaning the kitchen, bathroom and toilet; 13 minutes of preparing food; and 13 minutes of shopping, Singleton said.

‘‘It is ludicrous and impossible to implement.’’

In a statement, Sue Bramwell, the general manager of marketing at Nurse Maude, said that client care times could be increased or decreased depending on the needs of the client, which were reviewed regularly.

‘‘This does not affect the hours paid to the support worker. When

there is a shortfall, we pay unassigned hours so they receive the full agreed amount.

‘‘Our priority will always be attending to their care, which may mean activities such as putting shopping away become secondary to making sure their health needs are being met.’’

But care workers unions say the way home care workers are being treated is putting them in a moral dilemma – giving up their own time to give the client what they deserve in a respectful way versus sticking to their rigid schedule.

PSA national secretary Kerry Davies said they had tried to address issues with Nurse Maude but the response had been inadequate.

PSA and E tu are working together on a campaign to address issues of a lack of adequate funding for care workers.

Union director Sam Jones, of E tu , said the rigid allocation of time for home care visits was unworkable. ‘‘It might take five minutes for the client to get to the door or the worker might get stuck in traffic for 10 minutes. That throws the time for the visit out instantly.’’

The professionalism of workers was not respected, he said.

‘‘The worker is forced to rush and there is no respect for the client in that.

‘‘No-one wants their parents or grandparents to be treated this way – like something on a production line. These are humans, New Zealanders who have paid their taxes their whole lives.’’