By Matt Wade
A mismatch between where most of Sydney’s care workforce live and where they work is hampering services that support tens of thousands of vulnerable people and taking a toll on the city’s economy.
New research shows 71 per cent of the city’s care workforce live in greater western Sydney, while at least 50 per cent of the demand for their services – including aged care, childcare and disability care – is in districts to the east of the city, especially the northern beaches.
Nurse Penny Farries spends up to an hour and a half commuting to work; long travel times are driving workers out of care jobs.Credit: Max Mason-Hubers
Community-based care workers spend an average of 1.5 hours in the car during each work day, while those who catch public transport to work in residential care centres spend an average of 2.3 hours commuting, research by specialist recruitment firm Orchard Talent Group shows.
The challenge of long commutes is affecting workers in other frontline sectors in Sydney, including health care and emergency services.
Many delivering care services are having trouble attracting suitable staff; some estimates show Australia faces a shortage of more than 100,000 workers in the aged care sector alone by 2030.
The Orchard Talent Group research found travel time was the biggest reason workers leave the care sector, followed by the cost of travel (including road tolls) and a lack of available transport. Pay rates were the fourth most common reason for leaving care work despite relatively low remuneration for workers in much of the care sector.
Orchard Talent Group chief executive Alex McDonald told the Committee for Sydney’s recent Sydney Summit that demand for care services in Sydney’s northern and eastern suburbs had doubled during the past decade.
“This hasn’t been a gradual progression; this has been a rapid shift, and it’s leading to some fairly significant challenges,” he said.
Many care workers do not consider it worth travelling long distances to jobs in Sydney’s high-demand areas because rates of pay in the sector are low.
“When we’re looking at Sydney, the largest disruptor to the care economy is actually the M4,” McDonald said.
The daily movement of care workers from the city’s greater west to suburbs in the north and east is putting additional strain on the city’s overstretched road and rail networks. Lost productivity due to road congestion cost the Sydney economy $7.7 billion in 2019 and that is forecast to reach $12.3 billion by 2029, NSW government estimates show.
Nurse Penny Farries drives up to 90 minutes each way from her home at Illawong in Sydney’s south to work at an inner-city hospital.
“Unfortunately, it’s something that I’ve just become used to, but that’s a lot of time that I could be spending at home with my family,” she said. “I guess you’ve got to go where the jobs are.”
The cost of commuting is an “absolutely huge” concern for Farries; each trip to work and back costs her about $22 in road tolls.
Farries said several of her colleagues have left nursing recently and in each case the pressure of commuting was a factor in their decision.
Nurse Penny Farries gets ready for the road. The cost of commuting is “absolutely huge”, she says. Credit: Max Mason-Hubers
“I think essential service workers should get a discount when they use toll roads,” she said. “That would help tremendously.”
Estelle Grech, policy manager at the Committee for Sydney think tank, said problems in the care economy were being exacerbated by two of the city’s greatest challenges – the ageing of the population and a lack of affordable housing.
“In Sydney’s north and east, the population is ageing faster than in other parts of the city and that’s creating a lot of demand for care work, but you don’t have an adequate supply of care workers in those places because of the second challenge, which is Sydney’s housing crisis,” she said. “Young care workers can’t afford to live where there’s high demand for care, and they’re being forced to travel hours to do that work.”
Grech said these “overlapping challenges” expose shortcomings in Sydney’s transport systems, including limited public transport services that operate outside normal working hours.
“We’ve designed transport networks that service the traditional white collar nine to five workday ... they’re just not designed for care workers,” she said.
Grech said the NSW government should offer discounted public transport to care sector employees to make it easier to work in the sector. It should also find ways to increase the supply of affordable housing for care workers in areas where demand for care services is high.
“These are not just nice things to do,” she said. “If workers can’t afford to care for our kids or ageing parents, we are going to have to leave the workforce to do it ourselves. Care work is foundational to the state’s economy and productivity but right now, that foundation is cracking.”
The mismatch between where care workers live and work is undermining the quality of care services.
“You don’t want people that you love being cared for by people who are just exhausted because they have to travel so far or work, or do extra shifts to afford to live in Sydney,” Grech said.
McDonald said the shortage of care sector workers in areas of strong demand means providers are forced to employ temporary staff at higher pay rates which pushes up overall costs and can result in inferior service delivery.
“You can imagine, to use an example, for someone in a dementia facility ... it’s deeply unsettling to have four to five different support staff every week [but] that is a normal outcome for many Sydney aged care providers,” he told the Sydney Summit.
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