Bernie waited months in hospital for a bed in aged care. It never came

“Hospitals were never designed to be places where people spend months and months on end,” said NSW Health Minister Ryan Park. “It’s terrible for them, most importantly, terrible for their families, and it’s certainly not good for a system like ours where we’re trying to get people moving through the hospital.”

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler is negotiating national health funding with states and territories for the next five years.

Park said the states could no longer “do the federal government’s job” by holding residents in hospitals, and that they needed to either be reimbursed or funded to deliver programs keeping people out of hospital in the first place.

Illawarra Shoalhaven, which encompasses Park’s electorate of Keira, is the health district with the most patients waiting for an aged care bed (86 as of Thursday).

Advocate and Illawarra local Val Fell, 96, said several aged care homes had closed in the area in the past decade and had not been replaced.

Fell, who recently endured a three-week stay in hospital, said not every older person wanted to go into aged care, and state and federal governments were jointly responsible for reform.

“It’s a shared fault, unless we have a national plan to look after the aged care sector,” Fell said.

A spokesperson for Butler and Aged Care Minister Anika Wells said the federal government had invested more than $200 million to get older people in NSW out of hospital beds, and had funded 1500 transition packages providing care after they are discharged from hospital.

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