‘It’s pathetic’: Brian’s plea for care to stay at home
Brian Findlow, 85, and Doug Edwards, 89, are among up to 100,000 elderly Australians waiting for assistance for basic care so they can live out their lives in dignity at home. The shortfall is growing, despite a promise of reform.
In 85-year-old Brian Findlow’s tidy home at Sussex Inlet on the NSW south coast, a town beloved of caravan park holidaymakers and weekend fishermen, there’s a bright yellow floral cloth on the table, baby pictures on the walls and papers pinned to the fridge with fading magnets. On the sideboard are homemade birthday cards, along with a picture of Findlow and the love of his life, Elsie, who had dementia before she died, not here but in an aged care home three years ago.
“I nursed her for seven years,” Findlow says, amid tears. “She was in an aged care home for the last 2½ years. It was hard.”
That’s one of the reasons Findlow, who is legally blind, so firmly wants to stay in the home where his memories were made and where he can live out his life with dignity. But despite attempts to be assessed for an aged care package for more than a year now, Findlow is still waiting. And he is not alone.
Ageing Australia, which represents the aged care services sector, believes the number of elderly people on the waiting list for home care in Australia may now be close to 100,000. The number is unknown, not updated since data was collected in December 2024 when the waiting list had reached more than 83,000.
But the number itself is not the problem; it is the fact each one of those on the waiting list is a vulnerable and often desperate elderly person who is not being looked after.
They are people like Findlow. Or 89-year-old Doug Edwards, of Alice Springs, who has been told that, despite having been assessed as eligible, he may be waiting up to a year for a home care package. Without it, Edwards will struggle to fulfil a dream held by thousands of elderly Australians like him: to age with dignity at home.
“I just wish somebody could help me,” Edwards says. “I worked until I was 75, and I thought that I’d get something out of life.
“It’s hard on me because I find it hard to make my bed and stuff like that. I try to manage, but it’s not easy at my age.”
Edwards receives just two 30-minute visits a week from a care worker as part of a basic package of care that falls under a “level one” category. There are four levels of home care packages all together, with the most basic level of care covering about $10,000 and up to two hours a week of support for chores around the home and potentially transport. The highest level package includes about $60,000 of funding and covers services such as nursing and personal care, medication management, mobility support, meal preparation and social support.
While approved for a level three package in late 2024, Edwards was told he might be waiting until October or November this year before he got the help he so desperately needed, ranging from support with daily tasks to regular chiropractor or physio appointments.
“I can’t even cut my own toenails any more. I can’t sit down on the floor or I can’t get back up again,” he says.
Edwards’ two daughters help where they can, but the former railway worker finds himself alone and unable to live out his retirement in the way he imagined. It’s a far cry from his early days, having left home in South Australia and joined the circus at 15 to serve as kitchen boy and care for the animals being toured across the country.
After completing his national service three years later, Edwards became a railway worker in Melbourne, where he met his future wife, Jeanette.
“She (walked) across the road. She went across the road in front of me. I got out the car and went back to tell her off,” he remembers. “That was back in 1962, by the end of ’62 we were engaged.”
But three years ago Edwards’ wife died, just a month short of their 60th wedding anniversary. Since then, things have become much harder for the great-grandfather. And help is slow to arrive.
“I need help. I need it now. Not next week or the week after. Or 12 months later,” Edwards says.
“The politicians need to get their act together and look after the old. They’ve done their work and time.”
Waiting times were reduced to 90 days for most packages in 2021, after the Coalition rushed to invest billions into bringing down the waiting list from highs of more than 100,000.
But what started as a positive downwards trend has now all but reversed, reigniting fears that thousands of elderly Australians will once more die waiting for care, and Labor promising to release more than 100,000 packages in coming years to address the problem.
The extra packages are part of broader reforms passed in 2024 that will create an entirely new support at home system and introduce a co-contribution scheme that will force elderly Australians to chip in for daily living costs – depending on their means – while clinical services will continue being totally covered.
Despite welcoming the reforms, the sector has raised alarm over the speed of the changes – originally due to come into force from July 1 – and decisions not to fully fund services such as assisted showering under the reasoning that this constitutes a daily task rather than a clinical need.
Following months of standing firm on the starting date, Labor in June gave in to demands to delay its reforms until November.
But this delay now leaves thousands of elderly Australians in limbo, waiting on the government to release its promised 107,000 additional packages to bring down waiting times.
Labor so far has remained silent on whether to heed calls from the aged care sector and 10 crossbench MPs for it to release 20,000 more packages immediately rather than wait for the new home care system.
In the meantime, the waiting list continues to grow.
Aged Care Minister Sam Rae would not say when the updated figures for the aged care waitlist would be published and said Labor had “inherited” the problems facing the sector from the Coalition government.
“We know the home care system we inherited from the former Liberal government isn’t working – it’s why we are delivering historic aged care reforms that will support the growing number of older Australians choosing to live at home as they age,” he said.
“The Albanese Government will roll out more than 80,000 new Support at Home places in the first 12 months of our $4.3 billion new program.
“Older people classified as high priority that need urgent access to home care are receiving, and will continue to receive, their package within a month.”
The politicking and the lists and the arguments over numbers mean nothing to Edwards and Findlow, who are still waiting.
Brian and Elsie Findlow’s love story is the stuff of epic novels. They met when they were four.
“We were living in terrace houses that faced each other … But one day I went into hospital for about three months after I had an accident … with a skip rope … when I came out again her family had moved away,” Findlow says.
Despite not seeing each other for many years, the pair reunited when they were 16.
“Our families kept in touch and one day I opened the door and … there she was. All I could think was: ‘Well, she’s grown up’,” he says.
From there the two were inseparable, and Findlow went on to join the army and was stationed in Germany during the 1960s.
It was a full life, a life marked with service and good humour, but most importantly with love for Elsie, whom Findlow cared for through her gruelling battle with dementia.
Now that he is the one who needs help, there is nothing available.
“It’s very hard, very hard, especially with the food. She did the cooking and stuff, and she could find a bargain. Where there wasn’t a bargain, she was brilliant,” Findlow says.
While Findlow is grateful for the goodwill of neighbours who help him with groceries, he is left vulnerable to accidents and injury.
After a fall earlier this year, Findlow was taken to hospital but couldn’t get home because his family lived so far away and he couldn’t afford the taxi fare.
“The government is always saying, ‘we want people to live in their own house’,” Findlow says.
“It’s pathetic really because they’re spending so much money and doing a lot of jumping up and down (about it) … But here I am.”
Australian Unity group executive of home health Prue Bowden says the stark reality is that Edwards, Findlow and the thousands of other Australians on the home care waiting list simply have “nowhere else to go”.
“We’ve got real blockages in our residential aged care, there are not enough spaces available. And it would be a very sad thing if, because we can’t get the funding flowing, and we can’t meet people with the care they need at the right time, that we see people transitioning to residential care earlier than they actually need,” she says.
“There is a very human toll of this system being under pressure. I absolutely applaud the government’s decision to rapidly fund … packages. But the reality is we now have a very significant timing gap. Five months is a long time in the life of people.
“I believe the big driver of why the waitlist is building is just because of the demand in the system, people hitting that age where they need more support to live independently at home, and even though the government has been lifting funding over those years, there is more demand than funding supply at the moment.”
Findlow and Edwards are part of that demand at the moment. They hope to hang on long enough to see the long-promised supply flow through and to be cared for as they deserve to be.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout