Remaking aged care in Australia starts with embracing people-centred design. Instead of the institutional model with its focus on restraint, we need to understand and design for people’s needs.
Many Australians come to the end of their life while living in aged care. But damningly, the aged care royal commission found many residents have worse palliative care options than those living elsewhere.
Aged-care workers earn little more than the minimum wage. Yet their job goes far beyond cleaning and caring. It’s time to take a leaf out of the nursing profession’s book and encourage more career prestige.
Publishing hospitalisation data is a good start. But ultimately we need information about each aged care facility’s performance to be publicly available.
If Australia created more age-friendly neighbourhoods — which really are more liveable for everyone — then we wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on underfunded, substandard aged-care homes.
Thanks to review upon review, we have plenty of evidence about the problems in aged care. But federal governments have shown ‘a lack of willingness to commit to change’.
The free market experiment in residential aged care is failing older Australians. Rebuilding trust in the system starts with valuing residents’ rights, and holding government and providers to account.
From mass climate change movements to cultural genocide of Uighurs in China, here are some of the headline human rights moments that captured Australia’s attention.
Doctors will have to justify prescribing the antipsychotic drug risperidone for longer than 12 weeks. But that won’t fix the problem of using drugs to manage aged care residents’ behaviour.
The aged care royal commission’s interim report paints a picture of a system in deep crisis. Its recommendations for action have some merit, but won’t address what are underlying, systemic problems.
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne
Associate Professor, Rehabilitation, Ageing and Independent Living Research Centre and Occupational Therapy Department, School of Primary and Allied Healthcare, Monash University