At the Royal Commission in Mildura this week we’ve heard harrowing stories of despair from families battling for respite care.
As a carer of a family member at home, the need for ‘respite care’ is essential to survival – a lifeline in your arsenal as a home-based aged carer.
There are advantages to caring for your loved one at home.
- Providing comfort in familiar surroundings
- Able to follow usual routines
- Autonomy in decision making
- Fewer visits to hospital.
But there can be downsides which may include:
- Having to deal with people coming to the house
- Taking on unfamiliar tasks
- Having to assume personal care for an elderly or sick person with intimate tasks, such as toileting.
- The unexpected, such as coping with someone who has fallen or who is in pain.
Caring for someone in the home can be an involved and emotional journey and respite care needs to be not just ‘available’ but ‘essential’.
As the Commission’s witness reports tell us, Australia isn’t faring well in its provision of easy to access, reliable respite care.
Are we alone in our aged care struggles?
Populations around the world are rapidly ageing. Australia’s aged care problems are the world’s too.
How individual OECD countries fund their aged care sector differs but in a quick guide produced by the Australian Government in 2017, Australia’s funding was compared with 13 countries with similar systems of government. There were only minor differences in overall funding for the aged care sector here at home compared with overseas.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says,
“Ageing presents both challenges and opportunities with demand for primary and long-term health care, larger and better trained workforce and the need for environments to be made more age-friendly”
Our Royal Commission into Aged Care provides Australia with the opportunity of a lifetime to ‘get it right’ for the country’s future generations, to fix ‘what’s wrong’, work on ‘what’s right’ and develop guidelines, produce tools, provide training AND funding for a brighter future.
