Home care for elderly 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¯ – who blame a systematically underfunded sector.

The PSA union receives 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-yearold 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 a time. ‘‘No justification, no explanation.’’

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

‘‘It is ludicrous and impossible to implement,’’ Singleton said.

NO TIME TO CARE, PGS 18-19