Most vulnerable let down again

An aged-care resident in the Melbourne suburb of Maidstone on Monday. Picture: AFP

The Morrison government should have thrown the kitchen sink at protecting the 250,000 Aus­tralians living in nursing homes from Covid.

Especially after they bore the brunt of the virus last year. Of the 910 people who died of coronavirus in Australia, 685 were in aged care. Most of those deaths, 655, were in Victoria.

We now learn a problem most Australians believed had been fixed, that of casual carers working across multiple facilities during a pandemic and thereby risking higher spread, continues.

This is because the program introduced last year by the federal government to financially support carers in Melbourne to work in only one facility was quietly halted in late November, even though many nursing home residents are yet to be fully vaccinated.

It turns out the program is triggered when and where the commonwealth Chief Medical Officer declares a Covid hotspot. It might be based on the best medical advice, as Aged Care Minister Greg Hunt says, but on a visceral level it feels like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.

Did the man on the street know aged-care workers were no longer supported to work in just one facility, for the safety of residents?

Now they do, I don’t think they’ll be happy.

It is not the workers’ fault: they are invariably low paid and need the extra hours to eke out a ­living.

The federal government argues the program’s intermittent nature is proportional to the risks in aged care, especially when virus in the community is so low, but the Victorian government has since last year maintained a policy that care workers in state-run aged facilities, admittedly far fewer in number than those governed under federal arrangements, work only in one home.

It’s time the federal government looked seriously at a similar approach. Shouldn’t we be erring on the side of caution until all staff and residents in aged-care homes who want to be vaccinated have received their second jab?

Speaking of which, the rollout of vaccines into nursing homes, and disability care as well, has been poorly managed by the Morrison government, despite its claims to the contrary. Remember they were category 1(a), the top priority, and should have been fully vaccinated, both shots, by now.

The response has been complacent, relying on a lack of Covid in the community. A royal commission has revealed the extent of neglect of those in aged care. The nation’s most vulnerable have again been let down.