Aged care residents, workers deserve better than 'blind Freddie'

One wonders whether the assessment might be even more scathing if it was done today, taking into account the deaths of more than 560 aged care residents since the Omicron variant of the coronavirus infiltrated nursing homes late last year.

Another alarming and newly revealed statistic is that one-quarter of shifts in nursing homes are currently not being filled as exposures keep staff away from work.

This, as the Sunday Canberra Times reports, means aged care residents in the ACT have been locked in their rooms for weeks and forced to go without daily showers.

The federal government's response has been to um and ah about whether to deploy members of the military to help fill the void left by absent aged care workers.

It has, however, committed to providing $800 bonuses for workers in the typically low-paid and highly casualised industry.

The plan to provide two payments of $400 has been derided as "a sugar hit" by the Labor opposition, which says it supports increasing base pay rates for aged care staff.

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Whatever strategies might be employed to boost the troubled sector, it is clear quick action is needed to support our most vulnerable and those who look after them.

The explosion of Omicron in aged care facilities has been likened by Warrigal chief executive Mark Sewell to "a time bomb", which his organisation's staff tiptoed around for as long as they could.

That bomb inevitably went off as the new, highly transmissible, variant of COVID-19 was allowed to circulate in a largely restriction-free Canberra community.

The virus seeped, as one would expect, into Warrigal's three Canberra region facilities, quickly infecting 120 staff and 98 residents.

Mr Sewell thinks governments, when deciding to allow life to go on with minimal restrictions, should have known better.

"Blind Freddie could have seen this was a recipe for disaster," he says.

Mr Sewell believes the disaster could have been averted had authorities clamped down until more residents were able to receive booster injections and nursing homes were stocked up with rapid antigen tests and personal protective equipment.

Aged care is, of course, just one segment of a society that desperately wants to move on from the seemingly endless waves of COVID-19 and the associated limitations on life.

No one can deny that governments must balance many competing demands in the battle to return to life as we once knew it.

But in the fog of that war, we simply cannot lose sight of the elderly and leave "blind Freddie" to watch over them.

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