Aged-care pay push
AGED-CARE operators apologised for “harm’’ to elderly Australians in nursing homes as a royal commission recommended pay rises and extra staff in a bombshell report handed to the GovernorGeneral Friday.
The damning report, more than 1000 pages long, demands a radical shake-up to aged-care staffing, funding and duty of care to nursing home residents.
Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission made 124 recommendations for reform, including a wage rise for low-paid carers and set staffing ratios for nursing homes.
Industry lobby group Aged and Community Services Australia said 64 per cent of nursing homes were run at a loss, and needed more taxpayer funding to hire extra staff.
“We know (residents) want and deserve more staff to care for them, and want to make them better paid and trained,’’ chief executive Patricia Sparrow said on Friday.
“We know we need to have more staff … the system needs to be resourced properly. Australia spends less than half of what other comparable countries do on aged care.’’
Pyramid Residential Care Centre chairman Paul Gregory said non-profit communitybased centres felt the brunt of funding shortfalls.
“There are nine centres from Cardwell north, and are all feeling financial pain,” Mr Gregory said. “The common issue we all have is bed numbers and occupancy.
“You need to be running nearly full otherwise you’ll not get the funding help from the government for each bed; it can turn to putty pretty quickly.”
Taxpayers will pour $22.5bn into aged care this financial year for 1.3 million Australians.
SCOTT Morrison has promised COVID-19 vaccine delivery will improve.
The Prime Minister confirmed that 90 of 240 aged care facilities scheduled to get the vaccines this week had been immunised by the fourth day of the rollout.
This follows reports of elderly nursing home residents across the east coast waiting to get the Pfizer jab, only for the doses not to arrive.
“I would say to those families to not be anxious about that in the early phases,” Mr Morrison said.
“If there’s logistical issues that arise with the program, they’ll be quickly addressed.”
Mr Morrison said the ninemonth rollout was starting slow and would increase in pace and scale.
“But at all times, safety is the paramount issue,” he said.
Health Minister Greg Hunt has defended delivery company DHL, saying it has operated almost “faultlessly”.
The Pfizer vaccine must be stored at minus 70C, making logistics key to its delivery around the country.
Meanwhile a tongue-incheek crowd-funding campaign to cover the cost of Queensland’s $30m hotel quarantine bill has inflamed an interstate battle with NSW.
The two states have spent this week trading barbs after NSW billed Queensland for hosting more than 7000 residents in its hotel quarantine.
Deputy Premier Steven Miles said some Queenslanders had been in contact offering to “pay their share of the $30,000,000 bill NSW have sent us for hotel quarantine”.
“If we were to split the bill it would be $5.84 for each and every Queenslander,” he wrote.
The Deputy Premier, who was slapped down by NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian for filming himself tearing up the invoice, facetiously suggested Queenslanders transfer $5.84 directly into NSW Treasury.