NFAW believes that a safe, high quality and sustainable aged care system is dependent on the workforce that delivers care.
This submission focuses measures that will enable the aged care workforce to grow and to adapt continuously, so that it can respond to current and emerging problems in the sector.
The principles underpinning our specific recommendations are:
- Social infrastructure is at least as important to national well-being as hard infrastructure. Treating social infrastructure as a cost and hard infrastructure as an investment distorts government decision-making and undermines the future of the sector.
- The aged care workforce is critical social infrastructure. At present there are significant shortages in aged care workforce, particularly in regional Australia and amongst higher skilled roles.
- Aged care infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. There is a need for a shift in focus from attributes of existing and potential workers to structural factors that underpin greater consistency across aged care and related caring sectors in levels of qualification and recognition of qualifications, in wages and in other working conditions. Uneven and fragmented reforms are counterproductive.
- Flexibility in aged care should not be focussed simply on filling rosters on a given day. Flexibility also requires the capacity to grow the sector and to respond to innovations to improve quality, such as mandated ratios of nurses to patients; accessible and effective complaints mechanisms for residents and family members, mandated unannounced inspections by those responsible for standards, and so on.
- Employees will enter and remain in the industry, embrace reform and sectoral change and invest time and money in new skills only if they are assured of a reliable employment foundation including stable and secure working conditions, a proper valuation of skill sets, and relevant, recognised and, wherever possible, portable training.
- A strong sector should not be built by passing the problems of casualisation, forced self-employment, and undervaluation of work on to other parts of the caring sector such as disability support.
