Nursing home operators hit a brick wall

as posted on TheAustralian

Victoria Laurie | October 02, 2008

RESIDENTIAL nursing home owners are closing beds and turning down hundreds of new federally funded bed licences in Western Australia, prompting warnings of a looming crisis in aged care in the fast-growing state.

Aged care operators have declined to take up 360 bed licences out of 1000 offered in the federal Government's 2007-08 funding round because they cannot afford to build new facilities or find staff for them. It is thought to be the first time a state has declined to take up such funding.

WA is 2000 beds shy of government targets, and the shortfall is expected to increase rapidly. A Productivity Commission report released last week found that demand for aged care services would rocket in the next 40 years. The number of Australians older than 85 is forecast to increase fourfold.

Stephen Kobelke from Aged and Community Services WA said the industry had spurned once-lucrative bed licences. "I was shocked," Mr Kobelke said. "Normally there would have been competition for those licences, but now the Government can't give them away."

He said several not-for-profit aged care facilities had told him they intended to hand back bed licences because they could not find staff to work in jobs paying less than $40,000 a year.

Construction of new residential care homes had slowed to a trickle, Mr Kobelke said, due to a 9.3 per cent hike in building and operating costs in metropolitan Perth. "There is no business case to set up a new aged care home, even on a charitable basis," he said.

Mr Kobelke welcomed the Senate inquiry into aged and community care facilities announced last week, but said inadequate funding coupled with the WA's resources and construction boom made the state a critical case.

The Productivity Commission found that the number of people older than 85 would increase from about 400,000 to 1.6million by 2047, and that changing health patterns would increase the number of frail older people needing intensive nursing care.

But Amana Living chief executive Ray Glickman, whose Anglican Church body operates 15 residential care facilities, said staff were already in acute short supply in Perth.

Mr Glickman said 40 per cent of shifts in some nursing homes were being covered by costly agency staff, and he was struggling to keep doors open in regions where even agencies could not supply any workers. "Things are too serious now for us to remain silent," he said.

David Fenwick, who runs the 173-bed Amaroo Village in Gosnells, in Perth's southwest, said he had closed his waiting list when it reached 153 people.

"The Government has abandoned Australia's elderly in both pensions and aged care, and we need help to meet the real capital cost in Perth of providing new aged care beds at $220,000 per bed place," he said.


as posted on TheAustralian