Life-changing care boost for aged MND sufferer after Advertiser article — but disability bias stays

Geoff Walsh’s struggle with Motor Neurone Disease will be assisted by extra government cash after last week’s budget – and his wife’s plea in The Advertiser

Less than a week after telling The Advertiser she feared her seriously-ill husband Geoff would have to go into an aged-care home, Julie Walsh said the couple’s lives had been transformed by a sudden upgrade in their government home-care package.

Mr Walsh, suspected of having the rapidly progressive and ultimately fatal neurological condition Motor Neurone Disease, had been approved last year for a level-three package, which would provide 10 hours care a week – but until Monday had been given only level-one care, providing a meagre two hours help a week.

“We’re so excited,” said Mrs Walsh, 60, of Middleton, who has given up her job to care for her 66-year-old husband.

Middleton couple Julie and Geoff Walsh. Geoff suffers from motor neurone disease. Picture: Tom Huntley

“Our spirits have been lifted enormously. We feel like, you know, we are going to be able to manage, and we’re going to be able to … have a relatively safe and happy home life. Whereas I’ve been so stressed and tired and worried. It is pretty life changing.”

In the wake of last week’s federal budget, which added an extra 80,000 home-care packages – to cut a 100,000-strong waiting list – Mr Walsh has also been given high priority for the top level-four package, expected to be within three months.

That would provide 15 hours care a week through their home-care provider My Care Solution, which had lobbied for the increase.

However Mr Walsh’s benefits are still much less than disability advocates argue they should be, saying the federal government continues to discriminate against older Australians when treating disability.

MND (SA) chief executive Karen Percival has helped the Walshes with equipment and advice. She welcomed the extra help, saying 80 per cent of people with MND in Australia on waiting lists for top-level aged-care packages died without receiving them.

She said the government continued to discriminate against people diagnosed with a disability over the age of 65, when they were excluded from the more financially-beneficial National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Some people with MND, which could quickly rob them of all movement, needed 24-hour care and might receive $200,000 a year under the NDIS.

Yet even with the top level My Aged Care home package, worth about $52,000 a year, Mr Walsh would receive nothing like that.

The aged-care royal commission recommended the discriminatory age barrier be removed

by 2024 so that people over 65 living with disability, regardless of when acquired, should receive through aged-care programs the same supports and outcomes as those under 65 accessing the NDIS.

However the government didn’t accept the recommendation, instead saying it was “subject to further consideration” and would be looked at as part of a newly developed home-support program to be completed by the end of 2022.

Head of National Seniors Professor John McCallum said the government had done an enormous job in its aged care reforms, but this issue remained a thorny one that clearly discriminated against the aged.