The news is dominated by the spread of COVID in Victoria generally. Aged care homes have been caught up in this, largely due to community transmission – meaning random infections have been brought into the aged care home.
Across the rest of the world, and in particular in Western countries, aged care operators have faced the same challenge, and they have not had the successful containment that we’ve had. Look at this table.
Canada is the best country to compare with Australia – its history, its size, its immigration policies, its parliamentary system, its education and culture.
COVID has been catastrophic and the army has been sent in to find week-old bodies in aged care beds. The system has completely failed.
(Interestingly, last September our colleague Judy Martin spent a week in Toronto as a board member – now Chairman – of GAN, the Global Ageing Network, where Canada’s aged care was being presented as textbook world class).
The COVID challenge for Australia’s aged care sector is the fact that there is ‘no fat’ in the system. When a left field crisis hits, there are no reserves of trained people within each operator to match the increased daily workload. And the wheels fall off.
The Departments of Health in both NSW and VIC have discovered this. They have provided ‘surge’ staff but those staff don’t know the residents, their families, the operating systems. The first casualty is communication. The surge staff can’t have effective conversations with families or even GPs, and this triggers all the emotion and heat.
Aged care staff across Australia, and particularly in Victoria, have now been under the COVID siege for five months. They have done well and must be recognised for it.
