Plans to cut home care for the elderly are just the start of a process that’ll see even further reductions and ultimately more cost foisted on some of our community’s most vulnerable, city leaders, including a Labour Party leader likely to be seeking an electorate nomination, say.
The Southland and Otago DHB’s have started sending letters to elderly people telling them they soon won’t be eligible for the up-to 1.5 hours of home assistance they get each week.
GreyPower has decried the move, with local boss Geoff Piercy urging the boards to find the savings they want somewhere else.
Fellow Invercargill City councillor Lindsay Abbott, who works in aged care, said in a post to Southern Squall last week the cuts would have ”severe ramifications” on those who needed home care. It would have financial, medical, and social costs that would ultimately deny the independence of people living in the comfort of their own homes.
“Individual’s health and welfare does not seem a consideration in this barbaric attitude. Reminds me of the history of the Eskimos, where I understand the aged who past their useful productive lives were sent out into the snow. We have been snowed with the amalgamation of the two DHB’s.”
It was a harsh, cruel, and penny pinching proposal, Cr Abbott said.
“Has life and lifestyles for the aged, and infirmed become a ledger account?”
His comments pre-empted those of Labour Party Invercargill Electorate chairwoman Lesley Soper, who this week presented the Southland DHB with a 200 signature petition asking for the cuts to be reversed.
In her statement, supplied to Southern Squall, she said the cuts – which could save as much as $4m a year - came without warning and continued to cause major stress and distress for hundreds of elderly people and their carers.
Labour Party Invercargill Electorate chairwoman Lesley Soper (Squall Files)
Critically, she said the announcement ignored individual needs and failed to acknowledge the professional assessments of needs conducted before these elderly people got their home care in the first place.
Hundreds of elderly had only recently been reassessed, and had their home care hours cut to the level they were about to lose, she said in an impassioned – possibly pre-election nomination-seeking – address.
Petitioners understood the government wanted to save money. However, it was the southern DHBs which decided to target “the most vulnerable elderly” as “apparently the least risky service to cut.
It was “nonsense” that management did not accept that one or two hours housework might be all that stood between an elderly person staying at home and entering a rest-home, and that a further telephone assessment or GP visit was a more efficient use staff time than going to individual homes.
“We are delivering the message that this is nonsense, and these health cuts are totally unacceptable, as are the statements that the cuts will not stop here, but will go on further to include those receiving greater amounts of home care help and personal care, and will also include cutting the number of people going into rest homes.”
She warned the cuts would not save money. They would lead to sicknesses from unhygienic and unclean conditions, and falls and other injuries. More people would visit the A&E department or stay in hospital, and more would be “forced too early” into rest homes.
It was a short-sighted, damaging and insulting policy based on depersonalisation and an undervaluing of the essential service provided and the people who provide it. It ignored the real people affected and it carefully absolved the decision makers from even talking face-to-face with most of those who would suffer the consequences.
“These cuts are not acceptable; they are not fair; and they are not right,” she said.
Ms Soper said she would continue to collect signatures for the petition.
Health board also seem to have cut funding for youth health service (the decision was made in a public excluded meeting). Just as providing home help for the elderly keeps people in their own home and out of elderly care saves money long term, education and early intervention in youth health issues (notably mental and sexual health) is financially astute. Even if you discount the human element in these decisions, cutting these services will increase the financial cost.
The decision to cut support for the elderly was rammed through by ministerially-appointed accountants, not responsible clinicians, while the directly elected DHB members, who rubber-stamped the decision, should all be dumped from office at the local body elections later this year. Remember, too, that the ministerially-appointed accountants will all be in line for lavish tax cuts that 90 percent of us won’t receive at all. It is also highly likely that the ministerially-appointed accountants, who are grossly overpaid by taxpayers for their “work” on DHBs, will also receive honours, possibly knighthoods, in return for making the final years of so many of their fellow-citizens a misery.