Page 1146 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 May 2006
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DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.48): I believe Mr Smyth was being far too gentlemanly. I was rather keen to hear what he had to say in defending the federal government on this one before I spoke because this is not an area of great expertise for me. From listening to Ms Porter’s speech now, I wondered whether only the federal government has a role to play in the provision of aged care. If I were to take her as my Bible, that is what I would think.
Nonetheless, my little bits of research on this matter in the last couple of hours indicate that there is a role for the ACT government to play. First of all, I acknowledge that there is a problem—it has been very clear through our local media—and I know it is not a problem that we experience just in the ACT; it is a problem all around Australia, no doubt elsewhere in the developed world as well. Of course in most developing countries people do not reach an age at which they qualify for aged care or, if they do, they probably do not have the facilities we have here either.
My office consulted the ACT Branch of the Nursing Federation and this is what we were told: in the last few years there has been no attempt made to bridge the wages gap between nurses in aged care and those in public hospitals. I believe that refers to the ACT. Without a doubt aged care is losing nurses, in part at least, because of poor pay rates. There is no doubt that funding for aged care is firmly in the commonwealth’s court, and that funding used to be tied to levels of clinical care, but that is no longer the case. Consequently, this makes it difficult to get below the surface of aged care suppliers who, when the question of pay rates is raised, simply argue that they do not have enough money.
At the same time, it is clear that the medical support needed by aged care clientele is increasingly complex and that more generally aged care facilities have a growing proportion of residents with high-care needs. On the one hand, aged care nurses probably need access to increasingly sophisticated medical training. On the other hand, unless wages and conditions improve, would-be nurses would have less and less incentive to take on that training.
A submission from the Royal College of Nursing to the Senate inquiry into aged care in July 2004 noted:
… that the issue of wage disparity between aged care nursing and other nursing specialities has been addressed at least in part by the $877.8 million allocated to aged care providers to pay more competitive wages. The direct burden of resident care falls upon registered nurses and yet current salaries do not reflect the responsibility that they carry.
This money from the budget could be put to even better use however, if it had been allocated specifically to address the gap between wages for nurses in aged care, and wages in other specialities. There is much fear among our members—
being members of the Royal College of Nursing—
that this money will not be used as intended but instead end up in the consolidated revenue of aged care facilities. This could be addressed by making it a condition of funding that the money be spent on improving wages. There is simply no incentive for nurses to want to work in aged care while the wages continue to be much lower than in other areas of nursing.
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