industry & reform
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Result or cause ?
The role of ageism in Covid-19 related deaths in aged care .
By Michael Fine
This is a difficult time for aged care in Australia in so many ways . We know this from personal experience working in aged care or from using it or visiting loved ones dependent on it . We know it also from the media .
Many of the problems in Australia appear to be self-inflicted through poorly designed and implemented policy . But most are also encountered in one form or another in other countries across the globe .
It turns out that when we consider the impact of Covid on aged care , we are not alone .
Across the globe , aged care has fared badly during the pandemic , as was recently documented in the double edition of the International Journal of Care and Caring devoted to the impact of the pandemic on care , which I edited along with Joan Tronto .
Plenty of other evidence is available , most importantly the specialist aged care collection produced by the International Long Term Care Policy Network , which is coordinated through the LSE in London .
Referring to recent data from the Australian Department of Health , Mike
Rungie pointed out recently in Insite that more residents in aged care facilities in this country had died with Covid in the previous 10 weeks than in the first two years of the pandemic combined .
Others point out that staff shortages have continued to limit support available to residents in homes while lockdowns and closures have affected large numbers of homes , isolating residents from their families for lengthy periods , in some cases for months .
Internationally , as well as here , there is a sort of collective pretence that everything seems to be getting better as Covid is put behind us . This stance has been quite deliberately promoted by governments almost everywhere , with the exception of China .
The official picture nevertheless confirms both the ongoing danger of the disease and the decline in mortality : according to World Meter , a total of 8,702 deaths worldwide were reported as due to Covid 19 in the week ending 7 October .
This relatively low figure was down 9 percent from the previous week . But , like the Australian media , the
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Ageism is difficult to eradicate .
international figures , do not report on any concentration of deaths in aged care homes .
It is right to be angry about this . ‘ Why is there no outcry ’, asks Rugie ? It seems we ’ ve been taught to think it ’ s OK to die of Covid in residential care if you ’ re old and frail , he argues .
These people were about to die anyway , that ’ s why they ended up in care . Is he , and many others who agree with him , right when he sees the answer to the problems as confronting the ageism that led to them being placed in specialised care facilities ? I too see ageism in action in this reporting and casual acceptance of this tragedy . Ageism is a good description of the outcomes when old people die while the authorities and the general public turn a blind eye .
But is it the actual cause of the deaths ? Might it actually be distracting us from dealing with the more immediate problems that need to be tackled ?
The term ageism is seldom clearly defined . Robert Butler , the American psychiatrist and gerontologist , who coined the term back in 1969 , described it as ‘ another form of bigotry ’.
10 agedcareinsite . com . au