Baby boomers will reinvent aged care, starting with the food

Boomers are unlikely to accept a one-size-fits-all model for their older years. Picture: iStock

My mother ate pretty plain food all her life but in her later years she paid a lot of attention to her meals. Preparing and eating food three times a day were highlights of a fairly restricted physical existence. She considered moving to a nursing home but always baulked; she knew she could adapt to an environment no one relished, but she didn’t think she’d be able to cope with the food. Mum had seen that nursing home fodder up close, having visited older siblings in homes over many years, and she was not impressed.

In the end she did cope with the food when she went into care at the age of 92, but it took a while. And she had her own stock of condiments to add to lunch and dinner to pep up the regular fare. She was not alone. Tasteless, unappealing meals feature strongly in the complaints Australians make about aged care. And that food will keep a lot of baby boomers like me out of aged care for as long as we can manage it.

My mother’s generation rarely dined out until very late in the piece. Food was about survival, not style. But from at least the 1980s we’ve treated eating out as a cultural as much as a social exercise; we’ve devoured cooking programs, cooking books and weekend restaurant reviews; we’ve grown familiar with gourmet shops and farmers markets; we’ve done food tourism and cooking lessons. Mashed potatoes and bland roast beef in sealed plastic flat-packs delivered to the nursing home from central industrial kitchens for reheating will not cut it with the boomers.

Nor will the unlocked doors and lack of privacy; the mealtimes designed to minimise staff penalty wage costs; the fact you can’t make your own cup of tea in your room; the presence of someone down the corridor who cries out repeatedly for help from overstretched staff.

Some boomers will opt to pay for more help — above government support — to stay in their own homes, but it won’t be financially feasible for most. Which is why the push for different sorts of subsidised care is likely to grow.

The federal budget next week will address the crisis in aged care — although it may fall well short of what the sector is demanding.

It’s a crisis that tends to focus on inadequate staffing, shabby facilities and the few but highly emotional cases of downright cruelty and quasi-criminal actions of carers or institutions. More money and better oversight will help but, if the basic structure of our paid care for older people remains the same, boomers are likely to be unreceptive.

Here is where it’s important to say the aged facilities I have vis­ited often to see family members are amazingly good, run by staff who try hard for the residents. My siblings and I witnessed great kindness and respect from staff in the years Mum spent in care before her death.

But it’s tough. Aged care removes your independence and to some extent the sense of who you have been all your life. You may be grateful for the physical help and security (leave to one side the more complex and admittedly common problem of how to care for those with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease), but adjusting to a room with ensuite in an institution is not for the faint-hearted. You are no longer in control.

Which is why the boomers, having enjoyed life in spades, having known few of the material limitations of their parents who lived in more spartan circumstances in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, are going to push for vouchers (or something similar) so they can curate their own old age.

We are the first generation to have watched our parents navigate aged-care facilities and, while we’re grateful for the assistance they have had, we’re not keen to join the club.

My generation talks of setting up high-end share houses with nursing staff and a decent cook-housekeeper. Or hiring a couple of carers to live upstairs and manage one’s decline, as well as walking the dog that you are not allowed at the nursing home.

There are occasional conversations about the way we will all gather on the balcony at the jointly owned private facility for drinks at 5 o’clock. There’s the serviced apartment option where you can wander down to the restaurant on the ground floor but get more help in a building where everyone is over 80.

More than anything, there’s an assumption that we are going to do it better for ourselves than we managed to do it for our parents. And we won’t be shy about demanding government assistance along the way.

Some of that pressure is already here as we agitate for mothers and fathers in care. The royal commission that will frame Canberra’s thinking for the budget was in no small part a result of the determination of the boomers to address the worst aspects of the present system by increasing resources for staffing and more specialised service.

But as the boomers see themselves, rather than their parents, in the frame, the pressure will move to offering alternatives to the present institutional model. The new models will not be cheap, but this generation is educated politically savvy and more individualistic than their parents. The idea that they will go quietly into the night, accepting a one-size-fits-all model for their older years, seems highly unlikely.