Care services ‘reaching crisis point

Services for sick and disabled people in their homes are "at crisis point" because of staffing gaps caused by low pay which home care companies say they can't afford to increase.

New Zealand's first "carers' summit" in Wellington this week was told of an elderly Otago woman who was not showered for three weeks this Christmas because there were no home care workers available when her usual helper went on holiday.

The chairman of Tauranga-based home-care provider SILC, Peter James, said he could not find the workers he needed for the first time in 14 years.

"Four weeks ago, a national provider group recognised that the staffing issues are at crisis point - that every provider is typically operating with vacancies of 5 to 15 per cent of their workforce," he said.

That gap was about to get much bigger as a result of pay increases averaging 20 per cent for nurses in public hospitals and a strong push to extend similar increases to nurses caring for the elderly in private hospitals.

"If that happens in isolation from the whole industry, then we are going to have greater marginalising around the care of people who are under 65 and of people in receipt of home care or home support," he said.

Other speakers at the two-day summit at Te Papa said pay rates for home support workers were only marginally above the minimum wage, which goes up to $9.50 an hour on Monday.

Sandra Wright, the manager of Auckland-based Focus 2000 which employs 700 staff, said she had had to turn away people needing home care for the first time in eight years because she could not find the staff to look after them. Her staff start on $11 an hour.

Jan Tulloch, general manager of Spectrum Care which runs houses for intellectually disabled people in Auckland, said she could not get staff despite being "one of the better payers" with a starting rate of $14.

"It's really great that the nurses have got a salary increase. However, in our little service where we employ a few nurses, we can't compete.

She said Spectrum was starting to look beyond qualifications for their new staff. Staff were then trained in 15 days on the job, "including a few buddy days in houses".

All three companies said they could not afford to increase pay rates because government funding had not kept pace with their costs.

"Our contracts with the Ministry of Health have increased 3.5 per cent in the last six years," Mr James said. Inflation last year was 2.7 per cent.

Carers Otago founder Dorothy McCaw, who cared for her husband for 14 years after a stroke left him severely disabled, said she was devastated when the district nurses who used to shower him told her they could not come any more because the money had run out. "It was like the sky falling," she said.

"In our area at Christmas we had an elderly lady who didn't get a shower for three weeks. That was shocking."

Retired Hastings woman, Doris Ward, said the formerly Catholic rest home in the town, St John of God, had stopped providing day care services for people like her husband Frank, who has Parkinson's disease, when the home was sold to a private operator in November.

"They no longer occupy the room that they used to [for day care]. There are no pool tables. My husband loved the pool," she said.

"Rest homes are being bought out by profit-makers who say they cannot make money on day care.

They're not interested because it means they have to have a special area, hire special staff and have things that the more independent person can do.

"Today they only want to cater for the rest home people, and if they have day care they have to do the activities of the rest homes which are really quite demeaning."

However, Carers NZ executive officer Laurie Hilsgen said Government funding for day care was still available and that community groups could set up their own facilities if rest homes pulled out of the business.

Health Ministry official Valerie Smith told the summit that new Associate Health Minister Pete Hodgson had been given "a new responsibility looking at the long-term sustainability of the disability and health services".

"There is in Government a very sincere concern about the paid caregiver workforce - that the training be improved, that opportunities, remuneration and career paths that follow [are improved]."

"There is a working party [looking at] the funding to provide all the things we would like."