By Adrian Black
Psychologist Tegan Podubinski knows her regional city needs more mental health support, but first, she and other essential workers need the childcare crisis fixed.
For psychologist and mother-of-two, Tegan Podubinski, a lack of childcare access will leave her community 20 weeks poorer in mental health services this year.
“We have have a very limited mental health workforce,” Dr Podubinski said.
She is an example of the one-in-three Australians who live in a childcare desert, where there is one childcare spot for every three or more children, data from Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute shows.
Dr Tegan Podubinski and husband Ty, with kids Ida and Henry in Wangaratta Victoria.Credit: Yasmin Rose Photography
In Wangaratta and its surrounding northeast Victorian catchment, more than nine in ten people live in a childcare desert, which means fewer doctors, nurses and teachers can offer full-time services in regions already under-served by worker shortages.
“Every time you jump on the Facebook notice page, you see somebody desperately looking for access to childcare and trying to figure out how the heck they’re going to be able to work,” she said.
Dr Podubinski sometimes takes her children to her work as a research fellow, or has been able to have Henry join a playgroup at a rural school when she offers treatment.
Despite the support, her limited days of childcare forced her to knock-back a role supervising rural psychologists-in-training, a missed opportunity to expand the local mental health workforce.
“These students would have been likely to stay in a rural area,” Dr Podubinski said.
“You can’t have a rural health workforce without the basic infrastructure that’s needed for a rural health workforce to exist.”
Maddy Butler is the campaign director at parent and carer group, The Parenthood, which is working to highlight the flow-on effects of poor childcare access.
“Teachers, nurses and allied health professionals have shared their frustrations of not being able to work and earn as much as they want to,” Ms Butler said.
“They earn less, while the entire town lacks essential services.”
Ms Butler said government subsidies were welcome, but did not go to the heart of the issue.
Ms Butler and Indi MP Helen Haines hosted playdates in July to hear from northeast Victorian parents.
“I commonly heard young mothers saying that as soon as they had a positive pregnancy test, they were on the phone to the local childcare providers to put their name down,” Dr Haines said.
Mothers were driving more than 120 kilometres to access childcare, while grandparents were also cutting work hours to help ferry kids around.
Centres that wanted to provide more places did not have the workforce to provide them, she said.
Better wages and conditions were key to addressing the workforce shortage, early education consultant Lisa Bryant said.
“The wages are lower than retail,” Ms Bryant said.
The federal government announced provisioning in the May budget for a wage boost for the sector, which has yet to be finalised by Fair Work Commission.
AAP