Aged care homes in the bush are closing and battling financial - TopicsExpress



          

Aged care homes in the bush are closing and battling financial difficulty 2 HOURS AGO AUGUST 10, 2014 12:00AM AGED care homes in the bush are going bust and frail elderly residents could soon be forced to live up to seven hours drive from their friends and relatives because government payments are inadequate. Around a dozen aged care homes in the bush have closed in the past two years and many more are relying on multi-million dollar federal government bailouts to keep their doors open. Nursing home providers say it costs 30 per cent more to hire staff in the bush and 20 per cent more for maintenance work, and the cost of food and incontinence pads can be up to 50 per cent more than in cities because of transport costs. Often homes have to pay to fly in nursing and other staff and accommodate them on-site, which adds greatly to the cost of running the service. Many of the homes still operating in more remote areas are open only because church and charity groups provide massive financial subsidies that are becoming unviable. “It’s not sustainable, if this is an ongoing situation the church would not do it indefinitely,” says Robyn Batten, chief executive of Uniting Church’s Blue Care and Australian Regional and Remote Community Services, the nation’s largest provider of rural aged care. Ingrid Williams, President of Leading Age Services Australia said many regional residential aged care providers are struggling to remain viable and face potential closure. “This would have a disastrous economic effect on many rural communities and without local aged care services many older people will be forced to relocate in order to access the care they need,” she said. “LASA Victoria believes that better support for age services in rural and regional areas including encouraging their utilisation can assist in retaining and re-abling a greater number of older people who make a contribution to community life”. A government viability supplement for bush nursing homes was increased by 20 per cent in the May budget to between $4.49 and $49.30 per bed per day, but providers say it still falls well short of covering the true costs of providing care. Aged Care Minister Senator Mitch Fifield says 950 services will benefit from the $78 million a year viability program. In addition the Australian Government last year provided almost $12 million to support cash-strapped services in the Northern Territory and the Northern Western Australia. A further $133 million will be spent on multipurpose centres in the bush that integrate health and aged care services in small rural and remote communities. The Government has asked the Aged Care Financing Authority (ACFA) to undertake a detailed study into the factors that influence the financial performance of aged care providers, including a focus on what drives better performing providers, the minister said. Robyn Batten says one service she operates will this year make a $2 million loss, and another will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rural patients wait longer than city patients for an aged care bed, they are less likely to get in-home aged care and many services in the bush are “on the cusp of viability”. And while many rural residents would like to die at home lack of palliative care services or even a local doctor make that difficult. National Seniors chief executive Michael O’Neill said rationing of services in rural areas may mean that some people cannot access care when they need it. “This can affect their ability to continue to function independently which can unfortunately result in a person requiring additional services or even hospitalisation,” he said. “In many rural and remote communities, they are unable to build tailor-made residential and community facilities, for example, for dementia clients or hygienic treatment rooms and do not have access to specialised equipment,” he said. Major reforms to the funding of aged care which switched to a more user pays system on July 1 pose a serious threat to aged care services in the bush. These changes will, in many cases, see people have to contribute either a bond (from the sale of their home) or a daily fee (from the rent of their home) towards the cost of their care. This change will increase the income of many aged care homes in the city but many rural residents have no homes to sell, find it harder to sell them or the value is much lower which means rural aged care homes are losers under the new system. From July next year in-home services that provide bathing, meals and other services in people’s homes could become uneconomic under the new system which will end the current cross subsidy system between city and country patients. The government sets a target of 113 aged care places per 1,000 people over the age of 70. However, a report into aged care in the bush by Aged and Community Services Australia last year found the number of places in rural Australia is up to 15 per cent below that level. Services in rural Australia are smaller, find it difficult to make economies of scale and attract staff, Aged and Community Services Australia chief John Kelly says. STATE BY STATE: THE STATE OF AGED CARE Northern Territory: Recently the Uniting Church aged care provider Frontier Services in the Northern Territory (which provides residential and in-home care for 760 people) needed a $5 million federal government bailout. And the Tracy Aged Care home in Darwin owned by that group had to close and find new accommodation for 30 residents aged over 80. South Australia: Earlier this year the ECH Group announced it was exiting residential care in South Australia and the NT. It has agreed to sell its 11 residential aged care services in South Australia and 10 services in the Northern Territory to Allity and the Mackenzie Aged Care Group. Tasmania: Aged Care Services Australia announced in December last year it would close its 40-bed high-care facility at Legana in Launceston. Queensland: The 16-bed Queensland state government owned Farr Home in Kingaroy was closed in November 2012. Victoria: The Victorian state government has closed public aged care facilities in Ballarat, Castlemaine, Koroit, Kyneton, Williamstown and privatised one facility in Rosebud. New South Wales: Baptist Community Services announced its Maranoa aged care facility in Lismore in would close last year because it could not afford to spend $1 million meeting new fire sprinkler regulations. news.au/national/aged-care-homes-in-the-bush-are-closing-and-battling-financial-difficulty/story-fncynjr2-1227019164676
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 23:30:01 +0000

Trending Topics



Recently Viewed Topics




© 2015