Ministers address $1bn aged care crisis forcing thousands of elderly patients to remain in hospital
The country’s health leaders demand a “emergency action üzere in order to cope with a 1 billion dollar maintenance crisis that forces thousands of elderly patients from the federal government to stay in the hospital and create critical health blockages.
Federal and state health ministers met at Perth on Friday to discuss a scary report that revealed that 2500 elderly patients ready to discharge were stuck in state hospitals and waiting for an old care bed.
The ministers of the state spoke together after the meeting and told reporters that an agreement was reached on better identifying the problem of emergency studies led by Queensland and better gathering data in the future.
SA Health Minister Chris Picton said that with an aging population, there will be more pressure on the health system in the future.
“There are patients trapped in this hospital beds,“ he said to journalists.
“It is not a good result for months and months to stay in the hospital for months and months, but it is also terrible for other patients who need hospital care.
“This is equivalent to 880,000 nights every year from the system of our state hospitals, and the cost is approximately 1 billion dollars in the entire system. So this is an urgent issue.”
NSW Health Minister Ryan Park, while waiting to see how many beds are needed, the problem will worse, he said.
Im I’m not ready to do this, ”he said.
“(Hospitals) are never designed to be elderly care houses. This is not the way of working in this country.
“That’s why we need to go back to a situation where Commonwealth takes the old care burden and provides acute health services.”
A report prepared by the SA government was presented to a meeting that was a critical shortage of elderly care facilities.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said that the ongoing wave of the baby explosions entering the elderly care system leads to a crisis.
Butler, in the early hours of Friday, 7News told, “more money in the last three years and more time and energy in the elderly care, there is no policy area,” he said.
“Because when we came to the government, the staff were exiled and a new facility was not built.
“We know that we need to build an enormous number of new facilities to meet the Baby Boomer generation that is currently on us.
“Therefore, we provide record financing to state governments to support hospital operations, and to help the old Australians have to go to the hospital in the first place, if they were in the community or in the hospital, they would move as quickly as possible.
“I’m not perfect, right now, we need to do more and more to do more to work to work with my state and regional health colleagues (today).”
Mr Park said that the accumulated work of the old people in hospitals is not “sustainable” and “not the way our health system is designed”.
Park, said in a statement last month, “Thousands of elderly care and hospitals waiting longer than the concept of NDIS patients are not good for the hospital system, most importantly, very bad for these patients,” he said.
