There is a dangerous and entirely inappropriate shortage of care beds for elderly across our region.
We have 66 beds in our Care unit at Kerikeri Retirement Village. These are occupied by 21 people in the ‘rest home’ wing, 30 in hospital care and 15 in dementia care.
These 66 people are the lucky few. Because in a part of the world where care beds are like hens’ teeth, they’ve hit the jackpot.
It breaks our hearts to know that there are families in our community that simply can’t cope with looking after their elderly or incapable relatives, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
It’s shameful that our national healthcare system is failing our elderly in such a massive way. We have to turn away people with the most heart-wrenching stories, who desperately need to find care for either themselves or their loved ones, and there is just no way we help.
Kerikeri Retirement Village funds its aged-care facilities partly through selling ‘occupational rights agreements’ for its independent living retirement accommodation. It also receives money from the Northland District Health Board for the care services it provides.
But these income streams are finite and stretched to breaking point just maintaining existing levels of staffing and care. Increases for aged care from the Ministry of Health are simply not keeping up with the increase in costs, putting people at risk.
We want to boost the number of care beds we offer to 100. But this will cost huge sums and we’re borrowing as much as we can to build new retirement accommodation. This is needed almost as desperately as new care beds, as a silver tsunami of Baby Boomer retirees starts to head shoreward.
So how to proceed? One avenue we’re exploring is bequests. But is this really what we should be banking on in order to build basic infrastructure so vital for the wellbeing of our elderly in the decades to come?
We think the Ministry of Health needs to look at some ‘outside the box’ solutions to deal with likely social problems as an increasingly smaller proportion of our elderly find it possible to obtain bed-based care. One of the potential solutions we envisage is a series of ‘construction partnerships’ between central government and aged care providers. Government would fund construction, with aged care providers like ourselves providing the actual service. In other words: “you build it, we’ll run it”.
This would ease growing pressure on three fronts. DHBs would face less pressure for care beds, aged care providers would not have to rely on the generosity of their communities for cash with which to build badly-needed basic care infrastructure, and families would know that there’s somewhere decent for Mum or Nana to get the bed-care when they need it in their old age.
