Even as dementia whittled away at his sharp mind, retired teacher Bernie Fitzpatrick was still riding his bike until the year before his death.
But a fall after sideswiping a bollard, and another while in respite care, left Bernie facing back-to-back stints in hospital. Janice, his riding partner and wife of 57 years, felt he was at the “beginning of the end”.
His final stay in hospital lasted five months while Janice searched for a suitable bed in aged care. Bernie died waiting.
Janice and Bernie Fitzpatrick on a fundraising ride on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, in 2015.
“To see him, an intelligent and fit man, go downhill like that … I was virtually helpless,” Janice said. “I think of him every day – we were young students when we met. We were lifelong partners, lifelong friends.”
Bernie was accepted for an aged care bed, but the offer was revoked after an assessment found the home wouldn’t have enough staff on the floor at any one time to care for his high needs. “From that time on, he was in limbo,” Janice said.
Hundreds of frail and elderly patients are spending months waiting in NSW hospitals for a bed in residential aged care, the latest state government statistics reveal.
Last Thursday, there were 455 patients awaiting discharge to aged care facilities, staying an average of 42 days longer than their doctors deemed necessary.
The figure is a sharp rise from pre-COVID levels, when there were 96 residential aged care patients in NSW public hospitals (January 2019).
“Hospitals were never designed to be places where people spend months and months on end,” said NSW Health Minister Ryan Park. “It’s terrible for them, most importantly, terrible for their families, and it’s certainly not good for a system like ours where we’re trying to get people moving through the hospital.”
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler is negotiating national health funding with states and territories for the next five years.
Janice and Bernie Fitzpatrick as young teachers in 1966, two years after they met at teaching college.
Park said the states could no longer “do the federal government’s job” by holding residents in hospitals, and that they needed to either be reimbursed or funded to deliver programs keeping people out of hospital in the first place.
Illawarra Shoalhaven, which encompasses Park’s electorate of Keira, is the health district with the most patients waiting for an aged care bed (86 as of Thursday).
Advocate and Illawarra local Val Fell, 96, said several aged care homes had closed in the area in the past decade and had not been replaced.
Where most patients are waiting for aged care beds
Illawarra Shoalhaven: 86 patients (up 18 per cent year-to-date)
South West Sydney: 65 patients (up 15 per cent year-to-date)
Hunter New England: 55 patients (down 12 per cent year-to-date)
Fell, who recently endured a three-week stay in hospital, said not every older person wanted to go into aged care, and state and federal governments were jointly responsible for reform.
“It’s a shared fault, unless we have a national plan to look after the aged care sector,” Fell said.
A spokesperson for Butler and Aged Care Minister Anika Wells said the federal government had invested more than $200 million to get older people in NSW out of hospital beds, and had funded 1500 transition packages providing care after they are discharged from hospital.
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