Aged care crisis looms

THE expansion of the aged care system has stalled, with the largest regional provider of beds announcing it will not be going ahead with its application.

Parklands Aged Care - Phillip Parry (CEO Torbay Retirement Villages) with some of the vacant rooms at the home. . Picture: Alistair Brightman

THE expansion of the Fraser Coast aged care system has stalled, with the largest regional provider of beds announcing it will not be going ahead with its application for an extra 40 high-care places.

Wide Bay already has Queensland’s worst ratio of aged care beds to people aged 70 and over.

The ratio in this region is the third worst in Australia and about to deteriorate further.

Torbay Retirement Villages Ltd CEO Phil Parry has slammed the Federal Government and said Labor policies were fomenting an aged care crisis.

“Our decision is due to the failure of the Gillard government to maintain funding for aged care,” Mr Parry said.

“The recent announcement that the government would rip another 4-5% from the value of our care subsidy was the last straw.”

Parklands Aged Care facility in Urangan has now had its application for 40 new beds withdrawn.

Torbay executives had invested more than 1000 hours of work on the application and spent between $10,000 and $20,000 preparing it.

“We cannot justify adding more nursing home places that will reduce our ability to care for our existing residents or mean that our already undervalued and overworked staff have to sacrifice more,” Mr Parry said.

He claimed no providers of aged care on the Fraser Coast were in a financial position to expand under the current government’s funding architecture.

Under Federal Government guidelines the national target is to achieve 86.8 aged care beds per 1000 people aged 70 and over.

Wide Bay has a ratio of 69.1 beds per 1000 in this age demographic.

Originally published as Aged care crisis looms