IT would be tempting to think that the shortcomings reporter Gabriel Fowler identifies today at two Hunter aged care facilities - one run by health fund BUPA at Waratah and the other by Anglicare at Booragul - were isolated incidents.
Sadly, however, even a cursory examination of documentation prepared by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, and before that, the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, reveal a litany of shortcomings across the sector.
This does not mean the problems at Waratah and Booragul do not deserve attention.
They do.
But the problems repeatedly identified across the Australian aged care sector appear to be so pervasive as to pose real questions about how much, as a nation, we truly value the lives and livelihoods of our older citizens.
In its most recent annual report, the Aged Care Commission identifies 2707 residential aged care services across the country, including 870 in NSW.
Figures vary, but somewhere in the order of 250,000 people are living permanently in residential aged care, and the sector has expanded rapidly in recent years.
Alarmingly, the Royal Commission concluded that one in three people in residential aged care had experienced "substandard care".
As unbelievable as the figures might sound, the commission says "the incidence of assaults may be as high as 13 per cent to 18 per cent in residential aged care".
"Substandard care has become normalised in some parts of the aged care system, such that people have low expectations of the quality of their care," the commission said four years ago this month.
Unfortunately, there is no compelling evidence to show that things have improved substantially since then.
The Aged Care Commission says the COVID pandemic made it more difficult to do its job, because of entry restrictions that included the suspension of the site visits otherwise used to accredit individual facilities.
The Royal Commission found that on average, government-run facilities provided better care than not-for-profits, which were in turn generally better than the for-profit sector.
Quality of care was "highly correlated with size"; the smaller the better.
Aged care may always have its shortcomings, but the time for excuses is well and truly over.
We owe our older citizens quality care, with dignity.
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