Staffing crisis still critical for aged

OVERSEAS workers needed to plug the aged care workforce gap have not returned since the borders reopened, with fears the staffing crisis will get even worse during the winter flu season.

Ciaran Foley, who is the chief executive of a not-forprofit aged care facility in Sydney, said a number of elements, including Covid restrictions, meant that staffing levels across the country were now down by between 20 per cent and 30 per cent.

He said the government needed to promote Australia overseas as a good place to live and work and reassure potential migrant workers that they won’t be locked down again if there were further Covid variant outbreaks, which he believed was putting some off.

“There’s been zero impact on the workforce crisis since the borders opened,” he said.

“We have spoken to nursing and staffing agencies who say people are coming back into the country very, very slowly in small numbers.”

He warned that the situation would get worse during the flu season with the level of fatigue among staff already extremely high.

“We are all feeling it,” he said.

Aged and Community Services Australia (ACSA) CEO Paul Sadler said his organisation, the peak body for notfor-profit aged care facilities, had called on the government to implement a plan for foreign workers to fill vacancies on a short and long-term basis where a local workforce was not available.

He also said ACSA supported personal care workers being added to the skilled migration list.

“We look to the next government to prioritise the creation and training of an Australian workforce via real wage increases and training to assist people into aged care,” Mr Sadler said.