Good on Winnie Laban and Sue Kedgley for organising the joint Labour/Greens series of meetings around the country to give older people a chance to express their concerns about the reduction in funding for health services.
The reduction in home support for thousands of older people has been progressing silently in many parts of the country as the Government has leaned on District Health Boards to cut expenditure. The District Health Boards have compliantly leaned on assessment agencies to do a bit of local expenditure “trimming”.
Unfortunately, the ”trimming” is often a 50% reduction in home support entitlement.
While District Health Boards will argue that it is only a cut from one hour a week to one hour a fortnight for the older people concerned it can be the difference between them living independently in their own homes or having to move into residential care.
I was recently involved in advocating for an older couple who were living securely in their Housing NZ home. He had developed dementia and she had a serious heart condition.
They were receiving one hour of home support a week to covered cleaning, laundry and some other jobs that neither of them was any longer able to do.
A phone call from the assessment agency told them that due to financial constraints from the District Health Board this was being reduced to one hour per fortnight.
Within three weeks of this re-assignment of hours the wife was admitted to hospital for a couple of days with heart problems and was told she was no longer able to drive their car for an important part of her weekly routine – picking up the groceries. I believe that this was due to the pressure put on her by the loss of one hour of home support, worth about $20.00 a fortnight or $520.00 a year to that DHB.
My investigations showed that for the cost of $520.00 per annum the DHB could have ended up tipping this couple both over the edge into residential care for the cost to the DHB of about $80,000 per annum. At the same time the DHB was showing a massive surplus of $1 million on its home support budget from the number of cuts it had made.
While the Union normally focuses on the dreadful wages paid to the workers who carry out the home support, our elderly population is currently being treated even worse than those who are paid to support them.
SFWU National Secretary's Blog 