Jobs summit: Low pay and stress are driving aged-care workers exodus

Australia lost 30 per cent of its aged care workforce through the pandemic-affected 2020-21 financial year.

Professor Sue Gordon of Flinders University says paying aged-care workers more was key to attracting more workers to the sector.

Australia lost 30 per cent of its aged care workforce through the pandemic-affected 2020-21 financial year, and 40 per cent of the ­ remaining employees say they are planning to leave the sector due to the low pay and high stress.

Flinders University professor of healthy ageing Sue Gordon laid out the enormous challenges facing the aged care sector, which is struggling to meet the demands of older Australians today amid a rapidly ageing workforce.

“Aged care in Australia is in crisis,” Professor Gordon told attendees of the jobs summit.

“Approximately 70 per cent of aged car providers are losing money. We do not have an adequate workforce in numbers or in capability to meet the needs of older Australians,” she said.

Speaking earlier in the day, Grattan Institute chief executive Danielle Wood said making sure care jobs were good jobs would be critical to filling the workforce needs of the future.

Ms Wood quoted CEDA estimates that the country needed an additional 30,000 to 35,000 direct care workers annually, and that “properly remunerating care work is going to be critical to providing the quality and quantity of health, disability, and aged care services our older population will need”.

Professor Gordon agreed, saying parity of wages was essential. “The reasons they (aged care workers) are leaving is because of pay, because of stress in the workplace, and also because of the administrative load, and each needs to be looked at before it becomes an attractive sector,” she said.

“And this is all happening when there is increasing demand.”

In the face of the quickly growing need for aged care services and the rising complexity of that care, Professor Gordon said better and more flexible training was crucial.

She pointed to the need for micro-credential programs, saying: “We need to have an agreement that a certain amount of learning and skills has equivalence in the VET and tertiary sectors.

“We need specialist skills as well as foundation skills. Foundation skills have got to be acknowledged across the care sector. We can no longer have these silos of aged, primary and disability care. It isn’t working for us. We need to provide flexibility.”

Professor Gordon said it was critical for the sector to use technology better “to unlock the workforce to actually deliver care”.