Every January, with hard news scarce, newspaper journalists pick the aged care industry for a kicking. It’s an annual New Year sport.
Over the past few weeks the headlines have included:
- “Nursing home profits soar as patient care declines” (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 Jan)
- “Aged care bed licenses should be issued to consumers not providers” (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Jan)
- “The aged care gravy train” (The Age, 9 Jan)
- “Our elderly need homes, not warehousing” (The Age, 11 Jan)
As a keen observer of the aged care sector, and the husband of a worker on the floor of care homes, I find this casual sport insulting to the hundreds of thousands of people who get up every day (and night) to work 24/7 rosters on significantly low pay to deliver respectful, warm and genuine care to our elderly.
Do the journalists understand that the shop floor workers have pride as well? Do they not consider the massive amount of work done across 2,800 care homes, not every day but every minute of the day?
Meanwhile aged care workers continue to work 24/7 on low wages, mostly receiving genuine thanks from the actual relatives who see their efforts every day.
Workers in aged care read the papers, watch current affair programs on TV and mix with their friends. If the media is telling the world that they are doing a terrible job, with no concern for the residents, just for the money, then they can be forgiven for seeking work elsewhere.
Who is going to look after the elderly relatives of the journalists then?
And what about the professionalism of the journalists? Rarely are the facts in their articles correct.
Correcting the record
Grant Corderoy and David Sinclair from specialist accounting firm StewartBrown weighed in to the nursing home profits article in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) on 1 January and I refer to the corrections they make to some of the facts quoted in the article.
The SMH article said that average profit (EBIT – Earnings Before Interest and Tax) had increased by 40 per cent for nursing homes from 2014 to 2015. The highly respected StewartBrown survey of 797 aged care homes (the article says the Bentleys survey data comes from “more than 150 profit and not-for-profit homes“) showed the average increase was 11.2 per cent after two years of far lower profits. They are now back to 2012 levels.
The SMH article says the average profit is $17.20 per resident per day. StewartBrown’s survey proves it is actually $10.88 per day on average. However if you take out the top 25 per cent of profit performers, the bottom 75 per cent earned just $2.11 per resident per day – or $770 a year from care.
This equates to less than 5 per cent return. In fact, most aged care operators are not enjoying an “earnings boom” as the article states.
Finally, the SMH article states that “aged care operators were rorting the $10.6 billion aged care funding instrument” which is the government funding; and that this had resulted in a “$150 million blowout in the aged care budget”. But this “blowout” equals 1.4 per cent of $10.6 billion.
A wide range of genuine reasons could easily cause it. However the journalists labelled it “rorting”.
February will be another month for the journalists and no doubt they will have another cause to kick for some easy, inflammatory headlines. Meanwhile aged care workers continue to work 24/7 on low wages, mostly receiving genuine thanks from the actual relatives who see their efforts every day.
Unlike the journalists.
Discussion1 Comment
Your article reflects a funda mental misconception that critics of the aged care system are being critical of staff. Serious critics are very concerned about the sate of staffing in nursing homes and the enormous pressure placed on staff by the current system of care.
What is clear is that there are too many failures in care and that good care occurs in spite of the system and not because of it. More worrying still is the absence of any reliable data about what is happening in nursing homes.
I can understand why staff somettimes feel defensive but it is the conditions under which they work that concers us and too often their inability to provide the care that is needed.
What we are interested in is suggestions for ACCURATELY assessing standards of care and quality of life and the impact of other factors on that. Until we have that information no one can have an accurate vieew of the sector and we will continue to have policy based on the misconceoptions of politricians and the advice of the self-interested.