Australia’s largest home care provider says its aged care workers are at “breaking point” and are only receiving a fraction of the Coalition’s promised $800 bonus due to flaws with the scheme’s design.
The vast and systemic problems facing aged care were exposed during the pandemic, including in home care, where workers have faced increased demand for services, huge staff turnover, abuse from families, and continuing low rates of pay.
Both Labor and the Coalition have promised to better fund aged care, including a pledge from the Coalition to fund 80,000 new home care places and pay aged care workers $800 as a workforce bonus, designed in part to retain workers in the sector.
But the chief executive of myHomecare Group, Stuart Miller, said turnover in the sector remained “nothing short of abysmal” and that the bonuses had meant “not a thing” in terms of staff retention.
The group’s staff turnover was roughly 30% in the past year, better than the industry average but still extremely challenging to cope with, Miller said.
“The outcome for us is that we are having to constantly manage which clients get the level of care that they need,” he said. “We make sure those people who have urgent needs always get met, but sometimes it means your house might not get cleaned this week, it might have to wait until next week, and that’s a really unfortunate thing for everybody.”
Miller said home care workers had largely been forgotten in the current election campaign, despite working on the frontline of the pandemic in roles of extreme stress.
He said the last two years had taken a huge toll on the sector, and called on the government to establish a new dedicated mental health support service for aged care workers.
Without it, the company fears mass resignations across the sector.
One of the company’s Sydney-based case managers, Megan Mainwaring, said the compounding pressures of the pandemic had led to increased stress and abuse of her care workers. More clients were staying at home and avoiding family contact due to the pandemic, putting more demand on home care workers to provide services.
“We just don’t have the staff and when we do have good staff, they move on to bigger and better things, because the pay is so low,” she said. “And it’s hard work – emotionally, not physically. And when you can go to Aldi and work as a checkout operator and earn $10 an hour more, it’s quite deflating.”
Aged care minister Richard Colbeck says the government has released 30,000 of the 80,000 home care places it promised last year. The funding is being progressively released until 2023.
“We are releasing new packages at the rate of about 770 per week to continue to reduce the waiting list – and at a rate that supports a workforce that has grown by 15,000 since the start of November and continues to increase,” a spokesperson said.
Mainwaring said she struggled to understand how 80,000 packages could be created, given the workforce challenges.
“When I get a notification to sign up another client, which is great, but I just go ‘where are we going to get workers?’,” she said.
“We just don’t have enough.”
Ian Yates, head of the Council on the Ageing, said the delivery of the 80,000 packages was on schedule. He said workforce pressures were, however, significant, and the ability to actually deliver the packages was “patchy” across different regions.
“High priority people across all four levels of package are generally getting their package within a month,” he told the Guardian. “But that’s high priority people, the rest it’s still some months and it varies from level to level.”
Miller said many of his workers were only receiving a fraction of the promised $800 bonus, because it was only available for work conducted in one stream of federally funded home care packages. Most of his workers worked across multiple funding streams, including for aged care clients funded by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and state governments.
“All of our workers work across multiple streams so actually very few got the full $800,” he said.
He said the sector was staffed largely by part-time workers, but the government had used a pro-rata system to calculate the bonus payment. That meant many workers received even less of the $800.
Colbeck’s office said the government also acknowledged the “pressures on the aged care workforce” and its impact on mental health, and pointed to the government’s funding of $7.1m to help ensure access to Beyond Blue.
