industry & reform
Keeping
the faith
Catholic Health chief on
valuing our elders.
By Conor Burke
A
t a time when the aged care
industry is looking for answers
to a number of seemingly
unanswerable questions, Pat Garcia looks
to the teachings of his faith for guidance.
Garcia believes we can look to the
example of Jesus and how he treated those
less valued by society as a guide to how
we approach aged care. At the moment,
Garcia says, the elderly are the least valued
people in our society.
The chief executive of Catholic Health
Australia (CHA) since October 2019, Garcia
comes to a sector that is in a state of
turmoil, but if he seems unfazed by the
challenges ahead, we could look to his CV
for answers.
Garcia has been at the heart of state
and federal Labor politics for most of
the last decade, including a stint as a
senior adviser in the Department of
the Prime Minister and Cabinet during
the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era. And most
recently as the acting General Secretary
of the Australian Labor Party’s NSW
branch, steadying the ship in the wake of
a cash donation scandal which saw the
resignation of his predecessor.
The move to CHA – the largest non-
government provider grouping of health,
20 agedcareinsite.com.au
community and aged care services in
Australia, encompassing 80 hospitals and
83,300 employees across the health and
aged care sectors – ticks a lot of boxes
for Garcia.
“This seems to mix a whole bunch of
things that I’m passionate about,” he tells
Aged Care Insite.
“I’m quite heavily involved in the Church.
I was the vice president of the St Vincent
de Paul Society. I do go to mass. I went
to a Catholic school. I’m still involved
in Vinnies now. So, how the Church is
going is something that really interests
me, but I also believe in the services that
governments provide to people. Two of the
main ones they provide is aged care and
hospital care.”
The philosophical principles of social
justice can be traced back to early Catholic
scholars. They concern the poorest and
most vulnerable in society and also the
life and dignity of a person, and it is these
ideas that guide Garcia’s approach to
health policy.
“We often talk in Catholic health about
the ministry of healing that applies to
both aged care and healthcare. Not many
people really know what the ministry of
healing is. One element is what we call
radical inclusion. For Jesus, it meant
looking at the most socially excluded
person and bringing that person to the
centre of his world. In those days, it was
groups of people like lepers,” he says.
“We also want to bring the most
excluded people to the centre of our
world. And we look around at the people
who are disadvantaged. Often today they
are people from regional areas, and so
we provide a lot of regional aged care
services, where a lot of other organisations
might not be willing to do that because it is
so unprofitable.”
Profit is a topic talked to death in aged
care, along with funding, but how do we
create an aged care system that cares
for shareholders and the elderly at the
same time?
“The question is whether we believe
aged care is a public good, and I believe
it is, much like we believe healthcare to
be a public good. Now in healthcare,
for example, you have a whole bunch
of public hospitals and they have to be
supplemented by private institutions. In
aged care, the funding effectively comes
from the public, and it’s done through
private organisations mainly,” he says.
“But the real questions for us is: Is aged
care a priority for the public? Do we
really care? Now, I think if you ask people,
they would say, ‘Absolutely we care.’ But if
you look at the top priorities of the public,
in any polling, you’ll find that aged care
doesn’t come up as an issue that’s top
of mind.”
Keeping aged care in the minds of the
public will be one of Catholic Health’s
top properties under Garcia. He has been