Elderly people are delaying entering aged care during the COVID-19 pandemic, sending the occupancy rates of residential aged care homes plummeting to the lowest level in more than a decade | niltiac
Elderly people are delaying entering aged care during the COVID-19 pandemic, sending the occupancy rates of residential aged care homes plummeting to the lowest level in more than a decade.
Grant Corderoy, senior partner at chartered accountancy Stewart Brown, which specialises in aged care, said that was "a very significant decline and the largest for many years".The federal Department of Health said 28,845 people across Australia went into permanent residential aged care between January and June this year. That was down 2 per cent from the 29,407 who entered in the first half of 2019.
Mr Corderoy said there was already a decline in occupancy over the past two years because of the increase in home care packages, which enable elderly people to receive aged care services in the community and remain living at home, but the trend was "obviously heightened by COVID". Some elderly people have left aged care to stay with family during the pandemic. The spokesman for Mr Colbeck said at any given time there were about 500 people on social leave, where they temporarily leave their aged care facility to stay with family, though only 13 people have accessed government-funded aged care services in the community while on leave since May.
"A lot of the providers would have used that money to purchase land and build aged care facilities … because they didn't foresee something like this ever happening," Ms Lane said.
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