It takes 152 days on average for senior Australians to be admitted to residential aged care, an increase in wait times of about a month in just the last year.
According to the latest report on government services statistics, published by the Productivity Commission, about 40% of senior Australians are now waiting nine months or more to be admitted into aged care.
Labor has seized on the statistics, citing the fact average wait times have blown out by almost 300% from 40 days in 2012-13, when the Coalition was elected to federal government, to 152 days in 2018-19.
The jurisdictions with the worst wait times for residential care were the Australian Capital Territory (325 days), Western Australia (210), South Australia (194) and Queensland (167). The states with better than average wait times were Tasmania (119 days), Victoria (124) and New South Wales (143).
For those seeking in-home care, the average wait nationwide was 137 days, up from 73 in 2012-13, with the longest waits in South Australia (221 days), Tasmania (213) and Victoria (200).
The Productivity Commission noted Australia spends $13.2bn on residential aged care and a further $5.9bn on home care and home support services, with almost all of that funding (98.2%) provided by the federal government.
The report finds declining rates of satisfaction with both the range and quality of services. Some 71% of people aged 65 or over who used or needed services said they were satisfied with the range available and some 84% were satisfied with the quality of assistance, down from 89.2% in 2015.
During 2018-19, a total of 7,828 complaints were made about aged care, including 5,748 complaints about residential services, a rate of 30 complaints for every 1,000 residents, up from 23 per 1,000 in 2017-18.
The shadow minister for ageing, Julie Collins, said the figures were “another wake-up call for the Morrison government on the terrible state of our country’s aged care system”.
“Older Australians deserve our respect but under the Liberals all they get is growing waiting times for care that they have been approved for,” she said.
“We already know almost 30,000 older Australians have died in just two years while waiting for care at home.
“This is completely unacceptable – what will it take for the prime minister to finally fix this crisis?”
In November the aged care royal commission released an interim report that described the aged care system in Australia as “a shocking tale of neglect”.
It called for urgent action including more home care packages to reduce the waiting list of 120,000, a response to the significant overreliance on chemical restraints in the sector and removal of young people with disabilities from aged care.
Later in November the government promised an extra $496.3m for 10,000 home care packages.
The aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, has said home care packages have grown from 60,000 to 150,000 since the Coalition was elected but it doesn’t want to “create a circumstance for shonky providers to come into the market” by ramping up the program too quickly.
