Labor says people are entering residential aged care because they can’t get home support

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The year-long wait for extra home care assistance for an elderly Tasmanian man left his wife and sole carer a sobbing mess on the floor unable to find the strength to go on.

Although the dementia sufferer’s federal government-funded home package was providing three 20-minute showers a week and two hours of respite care on a Monday and a Wednesday, it wasn’t enough. The family was pushed to breaking point.

“He can not feed, dress, shower, get out of a chair or get out of bed without assistance. He can’t even sit on a toilet by himself,” daughter Sharrie Gale wrote in a heart-wrenching email to Labor MP Justine Keay, which she read out in parliament.

The family’s plight is not unique. The waiting list for older Australians to access federally funded home care has ballooned to more than 121,000 people.

The Coalition quietly released the latest batch of data on the national queue for home care packages, on the eve of the AFL grand final. The data shows the waiting list has grown from 88,000 in June 2017 to 108,000 in March 2018 to 121,000 as of the end of June this year.

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Council on the Ageing’s chief executive, Ian Yates, said the government needed to allocate an extra 30,000 home care packages this financial year to make a decent dent in the waiting list.

He also urged the government to set a timetable to get wait times down to three months.

“Clearly it’s unacceptable that people are waiting for a couple of years to get the level of package they have been assigned,” he told Guardian Australia.

In the May budget the government allocated an additional 14,000 packages on top of the 6,000 announced last December.

The opposition spokeswoman for ageing, Julie Collins, maintains the government’s response to the crisis had been inadequate, accusing it of obfuscation and a lack of transparency.

“Older Australians are entering residential aged care or even emergency departments rather than being able to stay at home and receive the home care they have been approved for,” she said in a statement.

But the aged care minister, Ken Wyatt, insisted the government is doing its best to tackle the problem and pointed out there has been a record increase in senior Australians receiving home care.

The number of Australians receiving home care packages has jumped by more than 20% in 12 months, Wyatt said.

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He said in the year to the end of March an extra 14,392 people were receiving home care packages, taking the total number to close to 85,000.

“Our government’s commitment to home care is allowing more people to get their approved level of care and remain in their safe, secure and familiar surroundings,” he said in a statement.

Yates said the delays were taking a toll on family members stepping in to fill the void.

“Often its the spouse … who doesn’t get the help they need and they end up becoming unwell themselves,” he said.