Is there any more vilified group in our community than aged-care workers?
Watch Four Corners or read the letters in the Times and you could be forgiven for thinking that our residential facilities are staffed by incompetent sadists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our facilities are staffed by dedicated hard-working professionals.
While we all hope for a nice, clean and tidy death, the reality for a lot of people is not nice, clean, tidy or quick. It can be a long drawn-out affair with ever increasing mental and physical decline. It involves incontinence (and I have never seen anyone deliberately left in a dirty bed). It can involve ''horrific, gaping, raw wounds'' (Letters, June 3).
These are a sign of illness not neglect. If it were not for the concerted efforts of our excellent nursing and medical staff we would see a lot more of them. They are not ''allowed to develop'' they develop despite the best efforts of staff.
Space does not allow rebuttal of all the outrageous claims made but I would like to pay tribute to the dedicated hard-working staff with whom I interact with on a daily basis. The problem is not the staff we have but the lack of funding for adequate staff levels. Maybe we should take all those accreditation and complaints people and put them to work caring for patients. They would be very welcome; we would see better outcomes with the extra hands.
M. A. McCluskey, Weetangera
I fully support the need for transparency in the aged-care sector, including media scrutiny and the public's right to know about facilities that fail to meet accepted standards.
However, this need must be matched by mature editorial balance, which seems to be sadly lacking in the current national media focus on nursing home complaints. Across Australia there are 2800 aged-care facilities. In an overwhelming majority of these, dedicated and unheralded staff and volunteers are delivering high-quality care. All facilities are subject to a rigorous Federal Government legislated accreditation process, in which 44 different outcomes must be met, all which have as their primary focus the care of residents we serve.
Yes, mistreatment will sadly occur in a small number of facilities on occasions, and media scrutiny, along with improvements to the complaint system, should be welcomed. But the media should also be reassuring older Australians and their families that Australia does have one of the best aged-care systems in the world.
Moving a loved one into a nursing home is always a hard decision. But the overwhelming majority of the 175,000 older Australians in such facilities are receiving high-quality care and service from dedicated men and women, who have a passion to support the needs of their vulnerable clients.
Dr June Heinrich, chief executive, Baptist Community Services, NSW and ACT
Pension perspective
Readers of Markus Mannheim's article ''Taxpayer PS debt rises to $80b'' (May 28, p1) need to understand that unfunded liabilities are cumulative 40-year estimates they are not annual budget costs and by virtue of their 40-year nature will be large numbers; numbers too often used to grossly distort their relationship to annual budget cost figures and to strike fear into the minds of those who read them.
They are not, because of government accounting conventions, produced for much larger government programs such as Medicare or the Age Pension which costs five to six times that of public service and Defence pensions.
Incidentally, former Commonwealth public servants and Defence Force members' pensions average less than the married rate of the age pension.
Mannheim's figures, when expressed in annual terms, more appropriately translate to a taxpayer debt of $40 a year, or at the expense of distorting numbers, 77c a week for every Australian. Let's not forget that former public servants are taxpayers and pay full marginal tax rates on their pensions compared with most other superannuants who pay no tax on their superannuation after age 60 and who consequently pay a much lower rate of tax on any non superannuation income than do former public servants.
The only superannuation pension tax concession Commonwealth superannuant pensioners receive is a 10 per cent tax offset and even that is not enjoyed by many because of the operation of the low income tax offset and the senior Australian tax offset.
As to the generosity of the public-sector pension schemes, besides the discriminatory tax treatment, their pensions are indexed far less favourably than other government-funded pensions due to the use of the outdated CPI indexation which was discarded for the Age pension more than decade ago. Since then age pensions have rightly increased by 51 per cent whereas Commonwealth superannuation pensions increased by only 29 per cent. Commonwealth superannuant pensioners received no pension increase in July 2007 and will receive no increase in July this year.
Let's get things in perspective.
John Coleman, vice-president, Superannuated Commonwealth Officers' Association
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