Page 990 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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Members present would no doubt be aware of our award-winning GRACE program and the RADAR program, which deliver rapid assessment services outside the hospital in community and aged-care facilities, delivering care closer to home with amazing results, reducing the number of people who need to be admitted to hospital and making sure that they can get back home again as quickly as possible, if a hospital admission is required.
More broadly, better support for older Canberrans formed a key pillar of ACT Labor’s health policy commitments during the last election. Building on and recognising the importance of Calvary and their expertise and innovation in the care of older people, ACT Labor committed to establishing a centre of excellence in the care of older people at Calvary Public Hospital in Bruce, building on their innovation in the GRACE program and the palliative care needs rounds that are also being delivered and are a fantastic innovation in working with aged care.
Outside our hospital system, the ACT government will—and Minister Davidson spoke about some of this—work on creating dementia-friendly ACT libraries and government service centres, as well as piloting other designated dementia-friendly spaces.
I want to take a moment to pick up on a key point in Ms Lawder’s motion that she raised in this context; that is, aged-care services. I note that she flags the commonwealth government’s increased investment in Dementia Australia, in December 2020. While this is, of course, a positive investment, the royal commission’s damning final report shows that we still have much more to do.
The royal commission made specific findings related to dementia services. They included specific recommendations to completely overhaul the support pathways in aged-care services for people living with dementia, calling for new regulations on chemical and physical restraint, a workforce that is properly trained to manage the increased challenge posed by someone who has dementia and, key to this debate, developing national aged-care design principles and guidelines on accessible and dementia-friendly design for residential aged care.
Critically, on this last point, the royal commission also called for the commonwealth to provide funding for capital works to ensure that aged-care facilities meet this standard. I encourage Ms Lawder to put pressure on or to encourage her Liberal Party colleagues on the hill to ensure that the federal Liberal government delivers for older Canberrans and funds the sector appropriately to enact substantial sector reform, including in the physical environment, for people in aged care.
Of course, there are some local, innovative projects that would also benefit from true reform. One example is The Neighbourhood, Canberra, a proposal formed by a group of Canberrans to pursue plans for establishing a dementia village that is very closely aligned with the royal commission’s recommendations. I was pleased to catch up with The Neighbourhood’s members during Dementia Australia’s memory walk and jog around Lake Burley Griffin in February this year, and to hear more about how their work is progressing.
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