Health and aged care


More on shortfalls in aged care

It is now 7 months since the report of the Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety became public, but so far there has been little progress in bringing the quality and safety of aged care homes (mainly private) up to scratch.

Writing in The Conversation, three researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney, draw our attention to their research, published in the Australian Health Review, revealing that so far only 3.8 per cent of residential aged care facilities meet staffing requirements that are scheduled to become mandatory from October 2023. These standards relate to the time spent giving residents care, the proportion of that care to be delivered by a registered nurse, and the availability of nurses during the day.


Health funding – and Morrison’s clever arithmetic

Nothing unites premiers and chief ministers, of all ideological shades, as effectively as fiscal austerity imposed by the Commonwealth. So it is with their demand that the Commonwealth increase funding for the nation’s already over-stretched hospitals, even before the effects of opening up our economy at low rates of vaccination are manifest.

Health policy analyst Charles Maskell-Knight, writing in Croakey, takes us into some uncomfortable truths behind the headlines on hospital funding. He confirms the Commonwealth’s claim that its funding has increased by 71 per cent over the last ten years, but with the right choice of index numbers one can justify any change in funding. That 71 per cent comes from a formula that based Commonwealth funding support on changes in the CPI (but hospital costs rise faster than the CPI because hospitals are intrinsically labour-intensive), and on population growth (but the aged cohort, who are heavy users of hospitals, are growing faster than the population as a whole). He also draws attention to a long-standing tacit agreement that the states and Commonwealth would share hospital funding 50:50, but the Commonwealth share is still well short of 50 per cent.

That’s all before the states deal with the effects of Covid-19. It was the Commonwealth that failed to buy adequate vaccines when they were on offer, it was the Commonwealth that ducked out of its quarantine responsibilities, and it was the Commonwealth that neglected its responsibilities in aged care. Surely the Commonwealth should compensate the states for its failures.

Perhaps what lies behind the Commonwealth’s stinginess is a desire to squeeze the states more generally, by forcing hospitals to take an increasing share of their limited budgets. That means less state funding for education, roads, public transport, public housing and other services, making space for more of the Morrison government’s cronies in the private sector to provide those services.