VET
The carer crisis looms
Is anything more important than refugee boats and the price of carbon? One CEO says yes – if you’ re paying attention. By John Mitchell
With the federal election looming, the national media is consumed by a narrow range of issues, such as a solution to the influx of refugee boats and finding a palatable position on carbon emissions and pricing. But have the media and politicians overlooked a bigger issue that deserves front page attention?
Yes is the answer, according to Rod Cooke, CEO of the Community Services and Health Industry Skills Council.
“ We work in a unique position in [ between ] the education sector and the health sector and our observation is that Australia’ s biggest crisis is not the boats, it’ s not carbon tax, it’ s the massive growth in health and care costs,” Cooke says.
To back that up, he points to predictions that within 20 years under current policies,“ every state government’ s entire budget would be spent on health and care. If that’ s not a crisis I don’ t know what is.”
“ All we’ re doing at the moment is reinforcing the current paradigm of the medical model that’ s sending us broke,” Cooke says.“ We need to move from cure to prevention, with a better focus on wellness.”
A better policy setting would be to let consumers drive the agenda, he says.“ It’ s about shifting to a consumer-led model, where consumers determine what care they get and where and how. It’ s about delivery in the home and in the community, which is where people want it to be done, not in really expensive hospitals with really expensive super medical specialists.”
The crisis in health costs will only deepen unless there is a dramatic change in policy settings, Cooke says.“ The other issues are the ageing of our population and the workforce. Following the intergenerational report that was published a number of years ago, nothing’ s happened, which is unfortunate.”
Cooke says health and care workers are facing what he calls a double whammy: they make up“ the fastest-growing and the largest part of Australia’ s workforce” but there are already shortages and these are likely to get worse as staff age.“ On average, they are about 47 years of age, so in 20 years they’ re going to be shifting from being a carer to being a patient, so we have the double whammy of an older workforce that’ s going to be retiring.
“ We need an extra 800,000 aged-care workers over the next 20 years and we need an extra 120,000 to 125,000
32 | Issue 8 2013